Charles River Laboratories is boosting its capacity to understand how the immune cell compartment works within the tumor microenvironment under a new deal with Cypre Inc.
The nonclinical CRO will work with the San Francisco biotech company's 3D hydrogel technology to boost work on the tumor microenvironment to help predict how well new drugs might work.
The new partnership, financials of which were not disclosed, will give Charles River’s clients access to Cypre’s 3D tumor model platform, known as Falcon-X, adding to Charles River’s 3D in vitro testing services to “further optimize immuno-oncological approaches for its clients.”
Charles River said the main thrust of the deal was to help seek out new therapeutics that overcome cancer immunotherapy resistance, a major problem with new oncology meds.
The partnership will also allow Cypre to screen multiple therapeutic modalities alone or in combination utilizing Charles River’s genomically annotated and in vivo characterized cancer model database.
“Immunotherapy is a complex, yet promising area of development in cancer treatment,” said Birgit Girshick, corporate executive vice president of discovery and safety assessment, biologics testing solutions and avian vaccine services at Charles River.
“Cypre’s platform enables the ideal tumor culturing conditions for assaying various immunotherapies and targeted therapies and provides robust, reproducible data sets without compromising throughput that strongly correlates to our PDX in vivo results. By broadening our 3D in vitro services with this collaboration, we can provide our clients with a complete, integrated tumor model service platform.”