Cancer.
Test options before starting your treatment. In the lab. Without side effects.
Benefits of Reverse Clinical Engineering®
Increase your chances of a successful therapy
Only about half of all cancer patients benefit from a prescribed therapy1. By testing your tumor with the Reverse Clinical Engineering® test procedure, we help determine the best possible therapy for you individually and avoid ineffective therapies.
Finding treatment options for challenging cases
For rare or already advanced cancers, there is sometimes not much data available on therapy options or not many patients benefit from the recommended therapies. In such cases, the Reverse Clinical Engineering® test procedure draws on a patient's individual tumor model to help identify promising or alternative therapy options.
Get support in making the best decision for therapy
It is difficult to predict before the start of treatment if your patient will respond to a particular therapy. This is a challenge in choosing the right therapy. The Reverse Clinical Engineering® test procedure provides you with complementary in vitro data that enables you to identify the therapy with the greatest efficacy potential from diverse treatment options.
Improved patient care through precision medicine
About half of the recommended first-line therapies do not work or do not work sufficiently in cancer patients1. Moreover, with each additional line of therapy, the prognosis usually deteriorates2, 3. Using the Reverse Clinical Engineering® enables you to select the treatment predicted to be the most effective in an individual case right at the beginning.
Enabling progress through innovation
The Reverse Clinical Engineering® test procedure offers you a pioneering technology that aims to advance clinical practice in accordance with a Vision Zero. This procedure will enable you to play a part in bridging the gap between modern cancer research and practical application.
Requirements for the Reverse Clinical Engineering®
The Reverse Clinical Engineering® test procedure can be used to determine the optimal drug therapy for patients with malignant solid tumors. This requires fresh tissue from a biopsy or resection. The procedure cannot be applied to blood cancers (leukemias) or lymphatic cancers (lymphomas).
Your contact persons
Clinical Liaison Management
You are not sure if Reverse Clinical Engineering® is suitable for you? Or you would like to learn more about our method? Contact us or arrange a consultation.
How does Reverse Clinical Engineering® work?
We test anticancer therapies on your own tumor cells.
We aim to find your cancer’s specific Achilles’ heel.
Robots allow us to test hundreds of drugs in parallel – rapidly and accurately.
The data from your tumor is carefully analyzed and presented in a readily comprehensible way.
Add-on options, such as sequencing or proteomic analysis, can further reinforce the treatment strategy.
Facts & Figures
Selected literature
Wensink, G.E. et al. Patient-derived organoids as a predictive biomarker for treatment response in cancer patients. npj Precis Onc 5, 30 (2021).
Cancer patient
In addition to treatment options, ASC Oncology provided me with optimal support during a time of uncertainty and gave me new perspectives on my life with the disease. My oncologist implemented the recommended medication – with success!
King’s College London & University College London Cancer Institute
This new method by ASC Oncology’s effectively makes cancer patient care better than anything medicine has known before. The personalized approach significantly increases each patient’s quality of life and, at the same time, their chance of survival. From the outset, we as oncologists can avoid using ineffective drugs for our patients and
Collaborations
FAQ
We go one step further. Sequencing tumors, for example, can reveal changes in the genetic material that may be used as a target for treatment of your tumor. However, it’s not clear if the targeted treatment will work in your case. Recent studies have shown that only a fraction of patients (0.8 – 3%) have been able to benefit from a therapy chosen for its sequencing results (Tannock & Hickman, 2019). In contrast, ASC Oncology’s Reverse Clinical Engineering® uses a person’s own tumor model to directly test the cancer drugs’ efficacy. This allows a prediction to be made about how you will respond to therapy. Find out more about the test procedure under Science.
Your treating physician removes a small piece of cancer tissue during your surgery or biopsy and sends this directly to ASC Oncology’s laboratory. Our team of scientists multiplies the living tumor cells in the lab and grows “avatars” of your tumor, called ‘tumor organoids’. These avatars of the tumor can be used to test drugs that may be candidates for treating your tumor, allowing the most effective anticancer drug to be determined before therapy begins. Our results are an important decision-making aid for personalized anticancer therapy. Compared to following standard guideline recommended therapy, this approach has higher chances of treatment success. View a complete list of steps of the procedure here.
No, ASC Oncology does not replace your oncologist, but provides you and your doctor with additional information. Every patient and every cancer is unique. The results of the Reverse Clinical Engineering® test procedure will tell you and your oncologist which drugs are likely to be effective on your individual tumor. These additional insights increase the chance of receiving effective drug therapy right from the start and avoiding ineffective therapies along with potential side effects.
It varies. Depending on the quality of the tumor sample and the cancer entity, growing PD3D® tumor models can take different amounts of time. On average, the Reverse Clinical Engineering® test procedure takes 28 days from receiving the sample to preparing the final report.
Please do not send a sample without letting us know in advance. Please contact us at 0800 6988667 or use our online form to register a patient and send a sample. We will organize the pick-up and provide everything needed to transport it as quickly as possible – even for short-term requests. Take a look at our overview of the procedure.
ASC Oncology was founded in 2019 by leading scientists in the fields of pathology, biology, biochemistry, biotechnology, and tumor biology. We are an interdisciplinary team of experts, who together with lawyers and business information specialists, are dedicated in our fight against cancer and to advance precision oncology.
ASC Oncology benefits from years of expertise in 3D cell culture and the latest findings in the field of tumor organoid research through close collaboration with its sister company CELLphenomics, which was founded in 2014. In addition, we are supported by a top-class advisory board consisting of physicians, scientists, and patient representatives.