Browsing by Author "Alsaed, Bassel"

Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer death worldwide. Cancer immunotherapies have changed the treatment path in some cancers and even led to favorable clinical outcomes in previously incurable cancer types. However, only a fraction of patients benefit from the current immunotherapies. Even though immuno-oncology has great potential, it is facing several challenges including the lack of biomarkers, unknown mechanisms of therapy resistance, complexity of the tumor-immune interactions, and involvement of the complex tumor microenvironment that significantly affects therapeutic efficacy. It remains a great challenge to predict which patients will benefit from immunotherapies, and current immunotherapies are deemed expensive when compared to the more traditional therapeutic modalities. In this work, we aimed to develop platform to study responses to immunotherapy ex vivo in a personalized manner. The platform could enable the study of immune effects and T cell mediated tumor killing in the absence and presence of immunotherapy and other selected drugs. We demonstrate the utility of our ex vivo platform that has potential for personalized drug testing.