Hi I'm Matt, one of the founders of Notable Labs. Here are more specifics on our process:<p>Step 1: The patient undergoes surgery to remove their brain tumor, which is sent to our lab where the cells are grown.
Step 2: We use lab robotics to apply thousands of combinations of FDA-approved drugs directly to the cancer cells.
Step 3: Notable Labs analyzes the test results and provides them to the patient’s doctor, who can prescribe the drugs immediately without a clinical trial.
Step 4: Each treatment result allows us to algorithmically improve the drug selection process for future patients.<p>Glad to answer any questions!
No doubt GBM patients are in major need of novel therapeutic options. My major concern with this kind of a project is that the drugs may end up killing patients faster than the tumor will. For instance, some drugs are known to inhibit tumor growth AND immune cell signaling because they target shared pathways. The tumor can out-grow this interference; the immune system cannot. You will not know if your interventions are helping or hurting the people you are treating until you do a properly controlled study.<p>Second: in my experience, one of the major problems with screens for synergistic (or additive) therapies is multiple testing. If you test 100 compounds (10,000 combinations), a large number of combinations will appear to work by chance. Do you have a secondary screening approach to reduce false positives?