Technologies to help us understand the biology underlying drug response are in high demand, as many patients do not respond to treatments. Identifying potential responders is particularly important in modern cancer care, where therapies are potentially very effective yet extremely expensive. There is need of more in-depth understanding of which rare cell populations, (e.g. inside of a tumor) can influence the effectiveness of a drug treatment.
Single-cell analysis is a breakthrough technology to understand the biology of drug response, as it enables the detection of cell-to-cell variation thereby providing insights that are inaccessible when analyzing cells in bulk. We need biomarkers to detect the presence and the function of such cell populations.
Standard methods cannot easily distinguish the signal of a small, informative cell population from the bulk of the cells being analyzed. Powerful techniques, such as mass spectrometry-based proteomics, are lagging far behind genetics because of technical challenges. Metabolomics could be a solution, if ported to single cell level, because metabolic biomarkers are the most informative of cellular functions. Metabolomics consists of measuring a wide range of small endogenous molecules (typically in blood) and getting an accurate snapshot of someone’s actual physiology and health state.
Project Leiden Analytics will deliver a high-throughput, quantitative, single cell metabolomics platform built on LU-patented technology. In this Level 1 project, the platform will be first tested in an immuno-oncology application, because single cells analysis of circulating immune cells is considered one of the most effective ways to capture cells greatly affecting therapy effectiveness. The ambitious objective of this project is to detect metabolites predictive of which patients will respond to immunotherapy.
