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

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.