Thank you Michael Eisenstein and Nature Magazine. “To test potential new oncology agents, Vevo scientists are generating chimeric tumors that can capture a broad spectrum of tumor biology in a single go. The company’s mosaic platform consists of cells from tens or hundreds of different patient models that are implanted into mice to generate a patient- or cell-line derived xenograft model. This approach builds on academic work from cofounders Johnny Yu, Hani Goodarzi and Kevan Shokat at the University of Califorina at San Francisco. Mosaic-based experiments can reveal how different combinations of mutations influence response or resistance to various potential therapies. Alidoust notes that their library of patient samples is genetically diverse and encompasses many tissue types and driver mutations. “Every time you’re running a mosaic experiment, you are testing a drug against around one-third of the genetic backgrounds that are available,” he says. This approach could thus help identify specific subgroups of patients who, for example, might be the best fit for a particular regimen.”
Indeed: finding and optimizing drugs in rudimentary in vitro assays is like “finding the best sprinter and sending them to run a marathon” Thank you Nature Biotechnology (Nature Magazine) and Michael Eisenstein for featuring our work in this great piece. As Michael elegantly outlines, we at Vevo Therapeutics believe that the root of many failures in the clinic is how we model disease preclinically. We need better disease models that capture the fact that disease happens in a living organism and in extremely heterogeneous patients that can not be reduced to a single driver gene or protein target. Disease models that can capture this at scale will not only lead to better therapeutics but also unlock new business models that can change the economics of drug discovery. https://lnkd.in/gYnEuvVg Johnny Yu, Hani Goodarzi, Daniele Merico, Shreshth Gandhi