Webinar: Personalizing cancer treatments with the PARIS® Test for cholangiocarcinoma patients

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Personalizing cancer treatments with the PARIS® Test for cholangiocarcinoma patients Recorded:
Thurs., Sept. 23, 2021
4:00pm (Eastern) Presented by:
SEngine

Rare and aggressive cancers, such as Biliary Tract Cancers (BTCs), have a significant unmet need that current approved therapeutics do not meet. Conventional clinical trial-based approaches have been ineffective in bringing new treatments to the clinic for BTCs, as there is often an insufficient number of patients, and the rapid disease course leaves little time to test multiple drugs’ efficacy if first-line therapy is unsuccessful. Precision oncology aims toward personalizing medicine with the goal of treating the right patient with the right drug. To that aim, personalized drug trials via ex-vivo drug response testing on 3D tumor models can predict drug sensitivities or innate drug resistance for each patient’s tumor.

Here we describe a CLIA approved clinical assay – the PARIS® Test – which enables testing dozens of drugs on tumor-derived cultures in a clinically relevant time frame, prescreening drugs for potential effectiveness. The PARIS® Test can predict viable treatment options for patients with advanced disease who have received several lines of treatment, even where genomic markers are not available. We demonstrate the feasibility of each step in the testing process and describe key findings from 26 patients. The PARIS® Test provides the oncologist with a report ranking chemotherapy, targeted and endocrine agents as a tool to identify potentially effective drugs for future treatment.

Presented by

Payel Chatterjee, PhD
Lead Scientist for the PARIS® Test (presenter), SEngine Precision Medicine

Payel Chatterjee, PhD is currently Lead Scientist for the PARIS® Test at SEngine Precision Medicine. Prior to joining SEngine, Payel completed her post-doctoral fellowship at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center focused on effectiveness of supraphysiological androgen as a treatment opportunity in androgen receptor (AR) dependent prostate cancer. Dr. Chatterjee also studied the role of DNA damage repair deficiencies in cancer and how to exploit these weaknesses for targeted therapeutic intervention.

Astrid Margossian, MD, PhD
Chief Medical Officer, SEngine Precision Medicine

Dr. Astrid Margossian delivers 25 years’ experience as a breast cancer surgeon, in oncology practice management and in clinical trial development. She established a state-of-the-art blood and tissue bank at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and Buenos Aires, which focuses on biomarker discovery for breast cancer. Dr. Margossian also pioneered the clinical development of novel molecular diagnostics for breast cancer and is currently directing the clinical validation and implementation of the PARIS® Test.

Carla Grandori, MD, PhD
Chief Executive Officer, SEngine Precision Medicine

Dr. Carla Grandori is a physician scientist who has dedicated her career to understanding cancer with the goal to discover the next generation of less-toxic cancer therapeutics, tailored to each individual’s tumor. After her post-doctoral fellowship at MIT in Cambridge, Dr. Grandori joined the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, where her laboratory was established. The Grandori laboratory pioneered the technology for the development of the PARIS® Test, designed to identify personalized cancer treatments. In 2015, Dr. Grandori co-founded SEngine Precision Medicine to advance new medicines and the PARIS test toward clinical application.

Maddy Pollastro
Patient Clinical Coordinator – Project Lead

Maddy Pollastro is a Patient Clinical Coordinator – Project Lead at SEngine Precision Medicine. Prior to joining SEngine, Maddy was a Research Coordinator at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance with the Breast Oncology Clinical Trials Unit. She holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Kentucky.