SYNergic multimodal platform for high-throughput anti-cancer bOne-metastases theraPy ScreenIngS

Cancer is currently the second cause of death worldwide; however, the World Health Organization expects it to become the first one by 2060. Breast and Prostate Cancers (BC and PC) are highly aggressive tumours linked to top cancer-related mortality rates in the world, with the skeletal tissue as one of the primary sites of metastasis.This project, called SYNOPSIS, an acronym for “SYNergic multimodal platform for high-throughput anti-cancer bOne-metastases theraPy ScreenIngS”, aims at studying therapeutic agents against BC and PC in the perivascular niche around the bone-tissue within a lab-on-chip, with a multimodal approach involving time-lapse microscopy (TLM) and impedance optical-deformability cytometry (IODC).The proposed project is divided into four key phases:1. Organ-on-chip platform: design, fabrication, and testing of the microphysiological system (MPS), including the culturing of bone and cancer cells under fluid shear stress conditions and the administration of chemotherapeutic agents.2. IODC: design, fabrication, and testing of the module.3. Data acquisition: TLM videos of the cells in the MPS and IODC measurements.4. Data Analysis: optimise processing strategies for TLM and IODC data to leverage the various signals available for evaluating therapy efficacy.The action will bring: (1) a new MPS, mimicking cancer in the bone perivascular niche, overcoming literature’s limitations; (2) a novel IODC platform probing cell’s electro-mechanical features; (3) a first-time combination of TLM and IODC measurements in MPS. The principal objective of this action will be the realization of a multimodal platform for anti-cancer bone-metastases drug-efficacy evaluation (4), combining TLM video, IODC with a minimum of 10^3 cells/s, and data analysis reaching 95% accuracy on test data coming from independent experiments, providing the user with the rationale of the decision process, finally decreasing cancer-related mortality.