E!113736, PreBioM, Pelago Bioscience

Important results from the project

The aim of this project was to develop a service for predictive in vitro profiling of drug candidates in immuno-oncology. During the years that the project has been ongoing, we have managed to adapt our offer to also function in clinical blood tests and we have started correlative studies between the profiles we measured and the actual clinical effect of drugs in the clinic. In addition to this, we have established a database of profiles of various patients and healthy volunteers to serve as a reference for future investigations.

Expected long term effects

The results we have received from the project are interesting and valuable both from a scientific and business perspective. We have mapped how different antibody-based drugs have different mechanisms of action in the cell, despite the fact that they attack the same target protein. We still need to correlate the different measured profiles with clinical outcome to statistically ensure biomarkers for efficient treatment. Such information can then be used to show early on in new drug discovery projects whether the drug candidate you are working with will have an effective mode of action.

Approach and implementation

Our method is based on how stable proteins are in their natural environment. In this project, we had to adapt the method to blood samples, which have also been collected in another location. We have had to miniaturize our experiments to cope with small sample quantities and many measurement parameters. Together with our partners, we have profiled the samples using various methods. The clinical samples were collected in Spain while samples from healthy volunteers were collected locally. We have been unlucky during the pandemic when large parts of the clinical labs have been closed.