Conventional models for preclinical drug screening offer poor predictive value for patient response, causing high attrition rates of new agents in the clinic. HUB’s proprietary Patient-Derived Organoid (PDO) Technology enables long-term expansion of primary patient material to generate ‘mini organs in a dish’ that can be used as patient avatars, thus bringing every “patient in the lab®”.

We present the world’s first PDO biobank of early-stage bladder cancer comprising 50 PDO models from transurethral resection of bladder (TURB ) biopsies collected at three hospitals. As a proof of concept, 5 PDO models were also biobanked from urine samples with similar efficiency of 70%, opening opportunities of companion diagnostics for bladder- and renal malignancies.

Our PDO biobank was extensively characterized at the clinical and molecular levels, confirming its value as highly representative of the NMIBC patient population. Next, we successfully identified potential new leads for further development by screening a panel of seven candidate drugs and two reference compounds for the treatment of bladder cancer on our PDO biobank.