11 Aug A project for personalized breast cancer medicine

Welcome to our project website!

BOTS was conceived in a context where the demands of organoid culture require very different skills to create hydrogels and use them. Teams capable of synthesizing and deriving marine hydrogels don’t have access to tumor samples or the ability to culture organoids, and medical teams with access to tumor samples and organoid culture don’t have the ability to create marine hydrogels. The necessary skills exist in the Atlantic Interregional Area, but the teams are not currently collaborating. From the point of view of the medical community, this is an urgent problem, as European tumor samples are now being sent to the USA for drug testing. In addition, marine materials play a key role in the development of the blue bioeconomy. The latter can enable the sustainable use of natural resources.

The goal is to use marine hydrogels to select the best treatment for breast cancer patients, but 3D cell culture is a billion-dollar industry where hydrogels have countless applications, from understanding how cells build tissue to high-throughput drug development in Big Pharma. It is now widely understood and accepted that drug sensitivity is different when cells are grown in 3D hydrogels and on plastic dishes, and it is the response in 3D hydrogels that counts in predicting the true response in patients. This means that drug development by the pharmaceutical industry and the selection of treatments for personalized medicine must be carried out with 3D hydrogels. The lasting effect for the medical teams linked to the partners will be to enable them to select the treatment most likely to prolong survival and improve quality of life for cancer patients.

Structured around 3 WorkPackages, this project will create new hydrogels from marine biomass. Hydrogels are widely used for 3D cell culture, but current hydrogels have major drawbacks. To overcome these problems, we will synthesize hydrogels based on biopolymers derived from fish, crustaceans and algae, and derive them with peptides and ligands to support the growth of specific cell types and confer the physical properties needed for bioprinting. We will focus on developing marine hydrogels that can be scaled up for commercial use in drug testing using 3D printing technology. The 3D culture market is worth over €1 billion a year, representing enormous potential for job creation in the Atlantic area.

You’ll also find information on how to finance our project under the “funding” tab.

Stay with us to discover our results, milestones and impacts!