Oncomed Pharmaceuticals and Fluidigm have announced an initiative to apply Fluidigm's microfluidic tools to the analysis of tumour cell heterogeneity, including cancer stem cells.
The collaboration will combine Fluidigm's microfluidic platforms with Oncomed's cancer stem cell sorting technology to generate tools for analysing, quantifying and developing treatments directed at a highly tumourigenic cell population.
In the initial application, Oncomed will apply Fluidigm's Biomark system and Dynamic Array integrated fluidic circuits (IFCs) to perform detailed gene expression analysis of solid tumours at the whole tumour and single-cell level.
This phase will track changes in cancer stem cells found in human tumours following treatment with Oncomed's pipeline of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies.
The companies will apply this same technology to analyse tumour heterogeneity and cancer stem cell frequency across Oncomed's human-tumour bank, which includes approximately 100 human tumour biopsies that have been engrafted and minimally passaged in immunocompromised mice.
The Oncomed-Fluidigm collaboration also has the potential to include novel and next-generation microfluidic and tissue sample-preparation technologies that Fluidigm is developing.
