CRUSH CANCER
Dominate the $200 billion molecule-to-market roadmap.
“PEER® has the potential to enable early identification of biologic therapeutics, drugs, or specific combinations of therapeutics from a panel of candidates that would be most effective for treating solid tumor cancers. This would revolutionize cancer drug R&D, by forming a bridge across the gap that divides standard in vitro and animal models in preclinical evaluation of formulations.”
- Dr. Lonnie Bookbinder CEO
CEO ARIZ Precision Medicine
Pharmaceutical companies invest billions of dollars and over a decade or more to bring a new cancer therapy to market. Each year, US companies alone spend nearly $100 billion on preclinical research and clinical trials.​ And yet, over 95% of oncology drugs fail in clinical trials despite succeeding in preclinical evaluations.
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This is because cancer is not a monolithic disease. Each tumor develops differently based on a variety of factors, including the patient omics such as genomics, “enviromics” of the places in which they live and work, and even economics. Moreover, a tumor is not just cancer cells; it also includes the stroma, cellular milieu, extracellular matrix, and the influences of the 3D architecture of the tissue. This complex tumor microenvironment (TME) ultimately gates how therapies reach and affect the tumor. In other words, the omics tell the story, but the TME decides the ending.
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However, for decades, preclinical evaluations of cancer drugs have been based on monolayer cell cultures and animal models as the main gateway for new therapies, even though neither can represent the human TME.
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This creates a critical need to evaluate promising cancer drugs using human-relevant new approach methods (NAMs) that better represent patient tumors and their TME.
Match preclinical drugs to tumors.
CerFlux PEER®
predicts clinical efficacy of preclinical drugs using our human-relevant BEST cancer model.
Our Preclinical Estimated Efficacy Report (PEER®) is designed to help pharma and biotech teams prioritize their cancer drug pipelines around drugs that are more likely to succeed in human patients. PEER is powered by our human-relevant BEST (Bioprinted ex vivo Slice Tissue) cancer model that evaluates preclinical drugs directly on patient tumor tissue and tissue-engineered 3D microtissues that mimic human TME.
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PEER® functions as a high-throughput, preclinical, human-relevant NAM to:
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Prioritize which drug candidates should advance toward the clinic
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Compare responses across diverse human-relevant TME
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Benchmark drugs against standard of care or other competing drugs
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Generate structured, quantitative, unbiased, AI/ML-ready datasets to support richer analytics and in silico modeling
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As programs move closer to the clinic, our ChipMux™ biopsy-on-a-chip can be used for focused ex vivo screens on fresh patient tissue to support final go/no-go decisions, or refine trial design and segmentation strategies.​​
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By matching candidate drugs to human tumors before clinical trials, BEST and PEER help bridge the "valley of death" that separates preclinical discovery from clinical success, reduce late-stage failures, and support a more informed, efficient molecule-to-medicine journey in oncology.