Project Title:  Genome and Organoids to Inform Therapy (GOT IT)

Aim/goals:

1. We aim to develop and evaluate novel and effective biomarkers and treatment strategies for people with pancreatic cancer, expanding the reach of personalized therapy beyond conventional genomics
2. We will develop and prospectively evaluate a map from the biology of pancreatic cancers to the efficacy of treatments

This cohort will leverage existing MOHCCN cohorts, including COMPASS (NCT02750657) & PASS-01 (NCT04469556), with prospective sequencing as part of MOH within the Province of Ontario Strategy for Personalized Management of Pancreatic Cancer Study (Prosper-PANC).

Our study will combine recent developments in genomic technologies with a new platform that we developed that rapidly tests cancers against approximately 3,000 drugs. We aim to discover new targeted treatments for pancreatic cancer and develop tests that can match patients to the right treatments. The biology of pancreatic cancers will be comprehensively measured using whole-genome and transcriptome sequencing. The efficacy of treatments will be measured using the high-throughput drug screening of patient-derived organoids and real-life responses to treatments in patients. We will generate personalized mappings from biology to treatments for individual cancers using state-of-the-art deep learning approaches, leveraging all Marathon of Hope cohorts and computing infrastructure. We will prospectively validate our results in the Prosper-PANC study.