Preclinical evaluation of innovative cytotoxic drugs for the treatment of soft tissue sarcoma

Soft tissue sarcomas (STS) are a heterogeneous group of rare, malignant tumours of mesenchymal origin. Regardless their histopathological and molecular heterogeneity, patients with advanced STS are usually treated with a uniform way, using doxorubicin as a first-line therapy, with overall response rate of 15%. There is a clear unmet medical need to develop and test new experimental compounds for improving the treatment of STS patients. Using our unique platform of well-characterized patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models of sarcoma, we plan to evaluate the novel therapeutic approaches in vivo. They will include innovative cytotoxic drugs, antibody-drug conjugate for specific drug delivery and targeted agents. Furthermore, we plan to introduce in our novel models for preclinical drug testing (e.g. chicken chorioallantoic membrane model) for screening purposes, to decrease the number of animal experiments performed in our laboratory. The preclinical evaluation of novel compounds will be done using histopathological techniques (e.g. immunohistochemistry, immunofluorescence,...), Western blotting as well as molecular tools (RT-PCR, RNA-Seq,...).