Development of an in vitro screening platform for discovery of novel pharmaceuticals for bone metastasis to limit animal use in cancer research.

Prostate and breast cancer are among the top five most prevalent types of cancer and are responsible for 70% of all skeletal metastasis.

This is fatal as no currently available drugs effectively target metastasis.Drug discovery is extremely costly and time consuming, because of lack of in vitro models that accurately mimic a drug’s mechanism of action in the human body.

This leads to unnecessary use of animals that need to be addressed for a 3R perspective.The goal of this 3-year project is to develop an animal-free high-throughput in vitro platform for drug discovery that accounts for the mechanical drivers of metastasis.

We will target cancer cell dissemination (Aim 1), homing (Aim 2), and validate the model by known anti-metastatic drugs (Aim 3).We anticipate that this in vitro model will have significant impact on replacement and reduction of animal experiment.

This novel model bone metastasis would enhance the possibility for drug discovery to prevent or stop progression of metastasis in experimental research and pharmaceutical screening in industry.Together with experts in cancer mechanobiology and industry we have a team that can fulfil the goals of the proposal.

We will transfer our in-house developed in vitro model for mechanical bone degradation into a new model targeting metastatic dissemination and homing.

A successful in vitro model for discovery of anti-metastatic drugs will directly reduce the mortality in cancer patients and reduce cost for health care.