Computational modelling and functional validation platform for personalized colorectal cancer clinical therapy decision support

More than 150.000 persons within EU- die of colorectal cancer every year (more than 10% cancer-related deaths). For advanced-stages, where surgery is not possible, systemic therapy is used.

Although new targeted therapies pose great opportunities, the challenge is to link such therapies to those patients that will best respond to them.

Five-year survival is well below 20%, indicating the need for improved tools for patient stratification and personalized therapies.Our systems medicine approach uses computer models for personalized therapy design.

Boolean computer models representing individual patients’ tumours will be used to predict their response to drug therapies; in silico predictions will be compared to clinical outcome data available from cancer patients and to drug responses in patient-derived spheroid and organoid cultures. Discrepancies will be analysed to understand why some models fail.

Our improved modelling platform will take patient tumour data from ex-vivo grown material, produce short list of promising therapies to be tested on the ex-vivo grown material, to deliver a short list of patient-specific therapies to the clinician.We expect the decision support platform will improve diagnostics, prognostics and therapy design for advanced stage cancer, and improve stratification for clinical trials.

We will in parallel analyze  ethical and societal aspects of how a model-based decision support platform may affect physicians, patients and our health care model.