Caliper Partners with Catholic Health Initiatives to Augment Methods for Testing Anticancer Candidates

Caliper Life Sciences has formed a research collaboration with Denver-based Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI). The Center for Translational Research (CTR), which is part of CHI’s Institute for Research and Innovation, will work with Caliper Discovery Alliances and Services (CDAS) to develop improved methods for evaluating and predicting the efficacy of new cancer drugs.

CDAS will perform biomarker and standard-of-care drug resistance and sensitivity studies on fresh human tumor samples provided by CTR. CDAS will grow the samples under various experimental conditions including traditional 2-D cell culture, 3-D in vitro culture, and in vivo culture in mice. CTR will supplement the data with treatment history and diagnostic data for these tumor sources.

The partners point out that their work will allow testing methods to be extended to fresh tumor cells maintained under potentially more natural and disease-relevant conditions. “With increasing incidence of oncology drug candidates failing in late-stage clinical trials and with rapidly expanding knowledge of clinically relevant biomarkers, it is critical to develop comprehensive and disease-relevant cancer models that can be used to guide patient stratification to improve clinical safety and efficacy,” notes Kevin Hrusovsky, president and CEO of Caliper Life Sciences. 

“Access to human tumor samples through our new collaboration with CHI will complement Caliper’s broad offering of translational research services and contribute to our programs to reduce attrition or rescue failed drug candidates.” 

The CTR, based in Towson, MD, is a national laboratory that has a CLIA laboratory, biospecimen repository, and custom development capabilities. It acts as an innovation center for the CHI system by focusing on personalized medicine in the healthcare setting. CHI, which had annual revenues of $8.6 billion in 2009, is a national health system that includes 73 hospitals in 18 states.