Fueled by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, MoTriColor (Molecularly guided Trials with specific treatment strategies in patients with advanced newly molecular defined subtypes of Colorectal cancer), is a four year project coordinated by VHIO and powered by a total of eight clinical centers of excellence across Europe, in collaboration with Agendia for its prescreening program and the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) as its Academic Research Organisation (ARO).
Initiated in 2015, this Consortium is dedicated to conducting three clinical trials enrolling colorectal cancer patients with advanced disease who are, for the first time, being stratified based on their gene expression profiles according to recently established predictive signatures. Response and resistance to selected therapies will be tracked by liquid biopsy. Using these pioneering approaches, MoTriColor aims at identifying sensitivity of individual patients to the proposed experimental therapies and develop more precise anti-cancer treatments for these patients.
In celebration of turning two, and to assess progress thus far as well as roadmap next directions across the various work packages, MoTriColor partner INCLIVA Health Research Institute recently hosted the project´s 3rd annual two-day General Assembly Meeting in Valencia. With prescreening currently underway and patient inclusion across the three clinical trials about to commence, conversations, presentations and the plotting of next steps centered on several essential aspects ranging from operational and scientific elements of the trials, the prescreening program, proposed workflow for biomarker analysis, bioinformatics analysis, to translational research.
Concerning the latter, MoTriColor´s translational research program will use the patients’ samples through INTRACOLOR (Evolution of resistant clones to novel target-directed drugs in colorectal tumours: a genetic and epigenetic study of intratumoural heterogeneity dynamics project), which is supported by EU H2020’s TRANSCAN-2 ERA NET. Also led by VHIO, and running in parallel with the Phase I/II MoTriColor trials, INTRACOLOR Incorporates six MoTriColor partners to assess three novel targeted therapies for mCRC, each matched to distinctive gene expression signatures. Representing a new, comprehensive framework of translational research, emerging molecular data will be prospectively integrated in preclinical models and proof-of-concept clinical trials in mCRC and techniques are set to standardize across institutions and new hypotheses generated to be readily translate into novel drug development strategies.
Essential action points to come out of the two-days´ discussion and debate included the signing of agreements outstanding for the trials and respective coordinators, sites and sponsors, the planning of pending site initiation visits for trials 2-3, sample prioritization and INTRACOLOR, the setting up circuits to perform PDXs from patients across the various clinical sites, to name but a few.
To discover more about MoTriColor please visit: http://www.motricolor.eu/
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