Evaluation of an Automated System to Culture Metastatic Patient Circulating Tumor Cells in Embryonated Chicken Eggs (in Ovo Culture)

A variety of in vivo experimental models have been established for the studies of human cancer using both cancer cell lines and patient-derived xenografts (PDXs). In order to meet the aspiration of precision medicine, the in vivo murine models have been widely adopted. However, common constraints such as high cost, long duration of experiments, and low engraftment efficiency remained to be resolved. The chick embryo chorioallantoic membrane (CAM) is an alternative model to overcome some of these limitations. The chick CAM is shown to be a robust model for both the inoculation of cell lines and grafting of patient tumors for drug therapy evaluations and target genes/pathways analysis.

The start-up INOVOTION has developed a unique, highly sensitive and reproducible CAM assay to graft human cancer cells/tumors in the chicken egg environment. INOVOTION's technology was validated for over 55 human tumor cell lines, including carcinomas, gliomas and melanomas, as well as over 30 reference drugs currently on the market.

At INOVOTION, the graft of human cancer cells on the chicken CAM is currently conducted manually. To scale-up, the process was recently automated. The automation performance was assessed on cancer cells lines. The objective of this study is to demonstrate that the automation of the INOVOTION process enables tumors' proliferation using patient samples (from tumor samples or circulating tumor cells) as grafting material.