Industry Insights with Crown Bioscience: Analyzing the Suppressive TME with In Vitro Based Assays https://youtu.be/oEZ0zSRsRhY This episode of Industry Insights features Nataliia Beztsinna , PhD, and Marten Hornsveld , PhD, from Crown Bioscience , who recently presented a webinar on how the tumor microenvironment (TME) can impact clinical responses, as well as how patient-derived ex vivo tissue models can be used to maintain the native TME for preclinical testing. In this interview, they discuss trends in immuno-oncology research and describe how reconstituted TME and patient-derived ex vivo tissue assays can best be used within the drug development pipeline. This interview has been edited slightly for clarity and conciseness.

In the webinar, we asked the audience what approaches are most suitable for their research, what kinds of immune cells are most relevant to their work, and which tumor indications are most relevant for their research in the context of the tumor micro-environment assay. What can you tell us about the polling results?

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Figure 1: Polling results from the first audience poll in the webinar : "Analyzing the Suppressive TME in In Vitro Based Assays".

Marten: I was a bit surprised that almost 50% of the people were still voting for the 2D cell culture or organoid monocultures. While we have been trying to convince people through the course of these lectures to go for more complex setups, there are many good reasons to go for 2D and 3D monocultures still, but I do think it was an interesting outcome. If you look at the interest in immuno-oncology, its almost always more than just one culture. Nataliia: I was also surprised to see that 25% of people are still using 2D assays, but it takes time for the field to develop and 3D assays are a relatively new field that's still developing. Complex 3D assays especially, not only organoids, but the assays that have multiple cell types included, like what Marten and I work with, it takes time for the field to accept them. It was also interesting to see what cell types people were thinking of using. I think the majority are still most interested in using T cells, but there were some other interesting cells used. What do you think, Marten? Marten: For sure. In the end we forgot to include fibroblasts as an option, which was of course why everybody was tuning in for the cancer-immunity cycle talks. I think it's nice to see that there's a broad interest in different myeloid populations; its quite a complicated field thats up and coming in immunotherapy approaches. T cells, of course, are already one of the decade-long favorites to study. So no surprise there that most people are interested in working with those. Theres not as much interest in dendritic cells. Although there have been quite some promising studies recently where we can condition dendritic cells to start presenting tumor neoantigens, and then we transplant those. I think this is quite an interesting recent development in that field. Its also interesting to see that M1 and M2 macrophages apparently attract an equal amount of interest. Although I think for many people it will be hard to determine what polarization they want to target. This is also one of the questions in the podcast: how do you deal with those macrophages and, from this poll, it's clear that this is something people are very eager to get into. [fusion_builder_column type="1_2" layout="1_2" align_self="auto" content_layout="column" align_content="flex-start" valign_content="flex-start" content_wrap="wrap" spacing="" center_content="no" column_tag="div" link="" target="_self" link_description="" min_height="" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" sticky_display="normal,sticky" class="" id="" background_image_id="" type_medium="" type_small="" order_medium="0" order_small="0" spacing_left_medium="" spacing_right_medium="" spacing_left_small="" spacing_right_small="" spacing_left="" spacing_right="" margin_top_medium="" margin_bottom_medium="" margin_top_small="" margin_bottom_s