This installment of Supplier Spotlight® highlights Crown Bioscience, a global contract research organization (CRO) providing discovery, preclinical and translational platforms and services to advance oncology, immuno-oncology, and immune-mediated inflammatory diseases.

What is your company’s mission?

Our mission is to empower our customers to improve human health. We do this by engaging the finest scientific talent, upholding the highest quality standards and relentlessly pursuing innovation. Every day we strive to accelerate and de-risk drug development to help realize a world where every patient gets the right treatment, at the right time.

What products and services do you offer?

We offer a range of services from in vitro drug and cell panel screening, patient-derived organoids and patient-derived xenograft organoids to cell line- and patient-derived xenograft models for solid and blood-based tumors. Further, in vivo models for IO drug development, as well as in vivo imaging capabilities, and mouse clinical trials are also available.

We provide models and drug discovery platforms across several therapeutic areas including oncology, immuno-oncology and immune-mediated inflammatory diseases.

Lastly, we offer multiomics biomarker analysis capabilities, which can be applied to a variety of therapeutic areas, plus DMPK and bioanalysis services, to complement your biomarker discovery and other bioinformatics research programs.

What problems do you solve?

We support and accelerate drug discovery and development from target validation to preclinical and translational studies (toxicity, PK/PD, MOA, efficacy and biomarker services), on our big collection of in vitro, in vivo and ex vivo models. We also provide discovery and validation of potential preclinical biomarkers, enabling the efficient pivot into clinical development.

What are the most innovative tools and technologies that you offer?

• A 3D ex vivo patient tissue platform: a high throughput 3D phenotypic screen using fresh patient tumor tissues with accurate readouts of tumor killing and immune cell proliferation
• Drug resistant (innate, induced, engineered) in vivo xenograft models
• Tumor homograft and immunocompetent chimeric models to progress IO drug discovery
• Mouse clinical trials (HuTrial^TM): surrogate clinical trials in a preclinical setting leveraging our diverse PDX collection
• Bioluminescent in vivo imaging capabilities for orthotopic and metastatic models
• Comprehensive genomics and transcriptomics capabilities, including short- and long-read sequencing and optical genome mapping
• Our unique genomics services: mouse IO RNA-seq panel, cell line authentication through deep sequencing
• 4D-DIA proteomics and 4D phosphoproteomics
• Strong and customized bioinformatics support

What are your competitive advantages?

Our ability to provide rapid study initiation, along with our flexible, responsive approach gives us the edge over our competitors. To add to our extensive experience, we provide comprehensive profiling and unique historical data on our in-house models via searchable databases, validated assays and ready-to-use markers across a range of services.

Further, we boast the largest and most diverse, continuously growing PDX collection on the market, which is complemented by our wide range of tumor organoid models from 15 different cancer types, which is continuously growing.

Who are your clients?

Pharma and biotech organizations of all sizes that are actively developing therapeutics in the space of oncology, immuno-oncology, immune-mediated inflammatory and polycystic kidney diseases.

What new products and services are you developing in 2023?

• Global microbiome/germ-free capabilities and services
• Ultrasound capabilities for in vivo imaging
• Further proteomics services

Where are your laboratories and offices located?

Our operations are headquartered in San Diego, California, and we have ten additional labs and offices across the globe. Our locations in Europe include the UK and Netherlands, and we continue to expand our presence in APAC, with sites in Bejing, Shanghai, Suzhou, Taicang, Taipei and Zhongshan. We also recently launched a joint venture with our sister company MBL to offer our services to our clients in Japan.

Connect with Crown Bioscience