Eli Lilly and GE develop technology to make cancer drugs more effective

New technology has been tested successfully on colon and prostate cancer

New technology to make cancer drug more effective through targeting marker proteins specific to cancer cells has been developed by scientists at GE Global Research and researchers at Eli Lilly and Company.

Eli Lilly and GE have developed tissue-based biomarker technology that for the first time can simultaneously map more than 25 proteins in tumors at the sub-cellular level.

Identification of these biomarkers is an important step in the development of personalized and more effective cancer treatments, Eli Lilly and GE announced in a press release.

The new molecular pathology technology researchers can now look at a visual map of the tissue sample, seeing a cancer cell’s comprehensive biomarker signaling pathway, and the interplay of signaling networks inside the tumor.

The new technology could dramatically transform the current method of diagnosis of cancer. At present the decision of which therapy to prescribe are based on the histology of the tumor and, in some cases, the expression of just one or two biomarkers inside the patient’s tumor.

Mapping a tumor’s complex biomarker network could allow researchers involved in drug discovery and the clinicians making treatment decisions to identify the most effective cancer therapies for patients.

This also helps avoiding those drugs that are not as effective and save time, money and providing a better patient experience.

Lilly makes cancer drugs including Erbitux, which doesn’t work in patients with a certain gene mutation.

“By identifying multiple biomarkers on a cell by cell basis, physicians will be able to make more informed choices on therapies to prescribe, as well as therapies to avoid, based on a patient’s specific type of cancer,” said Dr. Richard Gaynor, vice president, cancer research and clinical investigation, Lilly Research Laboratories in the press communique.

The new technology has been tested successfully on colon and prostate cancer tissue samples and is believed to be applicable to all types of cancer.

It was just two years ago that researchers at GE and Lilly set out to discover key protein biomarkers that would predict the likelihood that a medication would be effective in treating certain cancers. Our new mapping technology is designed to bring new therapies to market faster and to make sure that the right patients get the right medicines, Mark Little said.

Eli Lilly and GE started collaboration in October 2007.

GE, with specialties in biology, bioinformatics, optics, fluidics, chemistry and mechanical engineering, have built a prototype system capable of staining, washing and re-staining tissue samples for study under a digital microscope. The system combines image analysis of cancerous cells and structures with GE’s patented visualization tools to provide a color map of protein concentrations within the sample.

“This new approach to molecular pathology unlocks information that has been hidden from doctors,” said Mark Little, senior vice president and director, GE Global Research.

By using the advanced molecular pathology imaging tools developed in this collaboration, companies like Lilly can use the complex molecular signatures within patient tumors to design clinical research programs to study if these biomarkers can predict which patients are most likely to respond to a particular targeted therapy.

Selecting the proper patients early, using these advanced technologies, could reduce the patient population sizes necessary for conducting clinical trials and will substantially shorten clinical development timelines. In turn, these changes should also lead to a reduction in the cost of drug development, the release said.

GE and Lilly also plans to extend their research agreement to include the study of four Lilly oncology molecules that are currently in the company’s development pipeline.

GE and Lilly will perform specific investigations in breast, ovarian, lung, and possibly gastric cancers.

GE Global Research develops breakthrough products in areas such as medical imaging, energy generation technology, jet engines and lighting. GE Global Research is headquartered in Niskayuna, New York and has facilities in Bangalore, India, Shanghai, China and Munich, Germany.

Headquartered in Indianapolis, Ind., Eli Lilly is developing a growing portfolio of  pharmaceutical products by applying the latest research from its own worldwide laboratories and from collaborations with scientific organizations.