A nonprofit lab in Bothell is doubling down on a cancer test that tries drugs out on a patient’s own tumor cells before a doctor ever writes a prescription. Cure First says it will more than double the testing capacity of its CLIA-certified Bothell laboratory over the next year, with a goal of serving more than 240 patients annually, while also hiring additional scientific staff to meet rising demand.
The expansion centers on the PARIS Test, which exposes a patient’s live, biopsied tumor cells to dozens of chemotherapies and targeted drugs to help oncologists figure out which therapy might offer the greatest benefit in the next line of treatment, according to BioSpace. The test is available in all 50 states through Cure First’s Bothell facility and is optimized for all solid-tumor cancers, the outlet reports. Cure First was founded by Carla Grandori, MD, PhD, who serves as its president and scientific director.
How the Test Works
Rather than relying solely on genomic sequencing, the PARIS Test adds functional information by testing living tumor cells against multiple therapies, according to Cure First’s own site. The approach grew out of a broader scientific push described as functional precision medicine — a strategy in which live tumor cells from patients are directly exposed to drugs to generate personalized, immediately translatable information for guiding therapy, per a study indexed on PubMed. The PARIS Test itself was developed as a functional precision-oncology platform built on patient-derived organoids cultured from biopsy or tumor-resection samples, according to a piece in Nature.
Since its creation, the test has been deployed in 1,300 patient-derived tumor models spanning more than 40 cancer types, the BioSpace release states. More than one-third of those samples supported research studies demonstrating feasibility and clinical utility, the same release notes. Grandori has previously said that, as reported at ASCO 2021, the PARIS Test showed strong predictive power, with more than 70% of patients’ clinical responses matching the organoid assay results, according to the Nature report.
Case Reports Point to Dramatic Outcomes
Cure First points to several individual patient cases to illustrate the test’s potential. In one, a patient with metastatic pancreatic cancer achieved a complete remission lasting three years after receiving PARIS-guided therapy when conventional treatment options had been exhausted, per the BioSpace release. In another, a patient with a rare ovarian cancer entered remission for more than two years after receiving PARIS-guided therapy while in hospice care, the release states…