Project Summary/Abstract Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is among the deadliest cancers with <9% five-year survival rate and an estimated 60,000 deaths/year by 2030. PDAC is often diagnosed at an advanced stage thereby precluding surgical resection for most patients. While new systemic therapy regimens have improved survival, availability of multiple options, without tools to select an optimal regimen from these (on an individualized basis), has created a frustrating paradox in clinical decision-making. Due to a lack of personalized predictive tools, current standard of care treatment strategy is based on prognostic factors such as age, stage, performance status, serum albumin, etc. There is a critical, urgent and unmet need to develop predictive tools that can identify optimal systemic therapy regimens and eliminate from consideration ineffective options, on an individualized basis, to improve quality of life and reduce overtreatment. CerFlux, Inc. is developing such predictive technology with its low-cost and rapid Personalized Oncology Efficacy Test (POET) to match each patient with the right treatment – before treatment – to transform pancreatic cancer treatment in the near-term and make a difference in the lives of patients and providers around the world. Our personalized medicine approach is unique and further enhanced by a commercial-academic collaboration between CerFlux, Inc. and the O’Neil Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The proposed project will build on recent work by our team including a patented (US 10,114,010B1) biomimetic in vitro platform for pharmacological transport and pancreatic microtissue tumor models. The commercial goal of this proposal is to identify best practices for using POET in personalized therapy. Our hypothesis is that response to treatment observed in POET will approximate the response in the corresponding patient. Our objective is to predict both effective and ineffective treatments for each patient prior to initiating treatment. We propose the following aims to achieve our objective: Aim 1: Calibrate and optimize POET for evaluating therapeutics using human PDAC cell-line xenografts for subsequent testing with patient tissue. Aim 2: Evaluate efficacy of various systemic therapy agents in POET on an individualized basis to establish protocols and best practices for using POET in personalized therapy. We envision substantial continuing commercial-academic collaboration between CerFlux, Inc. and the O’Neil Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham including the integration of machine learning to derive a “POET Score” – a personalized quantitative efficacy score – based on a combination of factors. Data from POET and the POET Score will help clinical teams rank treatments for individual patients before the first drug infusion. If successful, this SBIR-driven study has the potential to transform pancreatic cancer treatment in the near-term and make a positive impact around the world.

Project Narrative Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), one of the deadliest cancers with <9% five-year survival rate, is often diagnosed at an advanced stage thereby precluding surgical resection for most patients. There is a critical, urgent and unmet need to develop predictive tools that can identify optimal systemic therapy regimens and eliminate from consideration ineffective options on an individualized basis to improve quality of life and reduce overtreatment. CerFlux, Inc. is developing such predictive technology with its low-cost and rapid Personalized Oncology Efficacy Test (POET) to match each patient with the right treatment – before treatment – to transform pancreatic cancer treatment in the near-term and make a difference in the lives of patients and providers around the world.