The Saxon Ministry for Science, Arts and Tourism is funding four research projects for individualized cancer therapy with around 2.3 million euros. The projects will start this year and run for three years. One of the projects is the REDESIGN consortium with the goal to develope personalized medical therapy of Gastric Cancer. This type of cancer is difficult to treat once resistance to standard chemotherapy develops. Therefore, there is a need to tailor the therapy to each patient.  The REDESIGN consortium is led by Daniel E. Stange (University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus Dresden), in collaboration with Steffen Rulands (CSBD and Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems), Bon-Kyoung Koo (Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences), and Mette N. Svendsen (University of Copenhagen). 

Steffen Rulands will use functional drug response data generated from patient-derived organoids to predict the efficacy of different regimines of chemotherapy. These organoids are initially grown by clinical research labs from patient tumor tissue samples’and then exposed to varying cocktails of chemotherapy. Organoids are sequenced before and after treatment to detect mutations that may affect the outcome of therapy. Moreover, organoid growth speed, among other parameters, are measured during the treatment.

These datasets will be used by Steffen's group to develop quantitative predictions of treatment efficiency using two complementary approaches, stochastic models and deep neural networks. The combination of the two methods will allow for high predictive and explanatory power while tackling the complexity of the data. This complexity arises from the presence of mixed populations of cells in the tumor and different constellations of mutations between tumors from different patients. 

Eventually, the developed model will help understand how resistance to therapy develops. More importantly, it will predict how any given patient would respond to chemotherapy based on the constellation of mutations found in the tumor. It will also assess the likelihood of tumor relapse in patients for each possible therapeutic approach and recommend the therapy that targets the tumor cells carrying mutations that make the tumor more aggressive and relapsing.

Press release of the Saxon Ministry for Science, Arts and Tourism: https://medienservice.sachsen.de/medien/news/1037047

Steffen Rulands research group: https://www.pks.mpg.de/statistical-physics-of-living-systems