OssiGel: the formation of human mini-bones as personalized drug-testing platform

“Cancer is a huge societal concern representing one death out of sixth in 2020. The vast majority of existing cancers emerge or ultimately develop in bones: leukemia, lung, breast, prostate, kidney, bladder. Our bones are thus considered a privileged “harbour” for cancer cells, and this is also associated with a very poor survival prognostic: bone-developing cancers account for ~3 million deaths each year. When at all existing, treatments are poorly effective: 92% of new therapies successful in preclinical testing fail in clinical trials. This urgently calls for the development of models to study cancer and test therapeutics in a more reliable fashion. Towards this objective, we propose to engineer human mini-bones in mice, in order to mimic the patient bone-developing cancer condition. These mini-bones (aka human ossicles) forming in animals consists in miniaturized bone organs composed of the patient own cells, including cancer cells. The human ossicles are proposed as unique technology to study tumor progression but also test therapeutics in an advanced and personalized in vivo setting. “