iXCells Biotechnologies, a provider of human cell-based solutions and custom iPSC services, has entered an international collaboration to evaluate off-target chemotherapeutic toxicities in patient-specific organoids.
The collaboration is with Rosebud Biosciences, software company Kantify and Incite, a European consortium aiming to engineer 3D artificial immune niches to generate T cells.
“We are excited to be collaborating with Rosebud, Kantify and Incite on this joint initiative to demonstrate how hiPSC technologies and organoid systems can transform precision toxicology,” said iXCells CEO Steve Smith. “By starting from a patient’s own cells, we gain unprecedented insight into off-target toxicity, one of the biggest challenges in developing safer and more effective cancer therapeutics.”
The project will initially focus on predicting toxicity in heart, liver, and kidney tissue models, to develop personalised, multi-organ toxicity profiles for novel chemotherapies.
During the collaboration, iXCells will reprogram peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) isolated from the blood of a patient with liposarcoma, a rare, malignant cancer that originates in fatty tissues, into human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs).
Rosebud will differentiate these hiPSCs into heart, liver and kidney organoids using its industrialised organoid platform and perform the drug toxicity studies on investigational chemotherapeutic compounds supplied by Kantify. Kantify will use an AI discovery machine called Sapian to discover novel targets and drugs for underserved diseases.
Toxicity will be quantified through longitudinal imaging and machine learning driven analysis, cardiac activity measurements, live/dead viability assays, tissue-specific immunocytochemistry, and multiparametric readouts of structural and functional organ injury.
“This project is addressing one of the most urgent questions in oncology, determining whether a patient’s vital organs can tolerate life-saving therapies,” said Rosebud cofounder and CEO Dr Kitch Wilson. “By combining our scalable organoid technology with iXCells’ expertise in cellular reprogramming and Kantify’s AI drug discovery platform, we are creating a patient specific testing system for novel chemotherapy drugs that reflects exactly the type of new approach methodologies the FDA is encouraging.”
