The PDP process begins and ends with your oncologist.
We start by having a conversation with you and your oncologist to learn about your cancer and prognosis. Tailored treatment recommendations detailed in your Screening Report and ranked by efficiency are reviewed by your oncologist and tumour board who then decide which drug combination may be right for you. We work with your oncologist and provide post- PDP support for interpreting results and analysing optimal treatment recommendations.

Targeted therapies are designed to specifically hit target mutations present in the patient’s tumour and as such represent an improvement of traditional chemotherapy. This approach would work well in cases where a single actionable target gene is identified (e.g. BRAF), for which a drug has been developed (e.g. VEMURAF).
However, almost every tumour will show several actionable mutated genes, e.g. BRAF + APC + EGFR + PTEN. Taking one drug for every target is not possible because of the high toxicity produced by the combination of anti-cancer drugs. Thus, the oncologist is forced to choose from one of these mutations and select a targeted therapy based on partial genetic information, leading to failed treatments and tumour resistance.
PDP can introduce up to 20 cancer associated mutations per avatar and find the drug cocktails that target the oncogenic network created by them. Thus, the treatment recommendation is developed based on a comprehensive mutational cancer landscape.

PDP can be employed for patients with gastro-intestinal (GI) cancers, including tumours of the upper (e.g. oesophagus) and lower (e.g. colorectal) GI tract, as well as for patients with lung cancers. Patients with rare cancers or tumours of unknown origin for which no standard protocol has been established could also greatly benefit from PDP.
PDP can help identify optimal treatments for patients with early cancers as well as for patients with difficult to treat advanced cancers, who have exhausted treatment options with conventional approaches.
Finally, people with pre-malignant gut lesions can also benefit from PDP. The presence of adenomas in the digestive tract is well correlated with the development of a colorectal cancer in the following years. Non cancer patients with this feature can greatly benefit from having a pre-avatar model already built and ready to provide a treatment recommendation when required.
Please get in touch to find out if your specific cancer can benefit from PDP.

Drosophila (fruit fly) is the most flexible genetic model organism. The unique genetic toolkit available in flies enables us to introduce up to 20 gene mutations found in the patient’s tumour, allowing the creation of a fully personalised avatar carrying a tumour “à la carte”. The small size and the short life cycle of these animals permits the fast expansion of the avatar population. In this way, we create and utilise 400K flies (an impossible number for any other animal model) to run a high-throughput drug screening, allowing us to generate powerful pre-clinical statistics for every drug or drug combination tested.
Roughly 75% of human disease-causing genes have a functional counterpart in the fly. Drosophila has been used since the early 1900s to study human diseases, including cancer. The signalling pathways involved in cancer are conserved in fruit flies and in fact many components of these signalling pathways were first discovered in the fly.

The PDP process is one of the most recent innovations in personalised cancer care. The technology underlying PDP was developed by scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai (New York), and is backed up by decades of academic cancer research. A case study of a cancer patient receiving a therapy developed by PDP has been recently published (Bangi et al, 2019, Science Adv., doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aav6528). https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/5/eaav6528

PDP can take 2 – 4 months after tumour and blood sequencing results are available. The difference in time reflects differences in tumour type, complexity, the number of drugs and drug combinations tested until the final cocktail is identified.

MPT will produce two reports: An early report with DNA sequencing results, which will help you decide on the first line of treatment while PDP is in progress and a final full report detailing the best tailored treatment recommendations for your patient, ranked by efficiency. MPT’s scientific team will also give you post- PDP support for interpreting results and analysing optimal treatment recommendations.