In the latest issue of Mission Bio's On the Drop blog column, "Dr. Todd Druley Interprets the High and Low Mountains of Precision Medicine," Dr. Todd Druley, Chief Medical Officer of Mission Bio, introduced his career in pediatric oncology and molecular genetics, as well as the reasons for coming to Mission Bio. He also explained how to use Mission Bio's Tapestri platform to address the challenges faced by precision medicine.
Overview of Key Content
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Dr. Todd Druley's Career in Pediatric Oncology and Molecular Genetics
2 # Opportunity to Join Mission Bio
How to use the Tapestri platform to solve problems in precision medicine?
Career in Pediatric Oncology and Molecular Genetics
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Dr. Todd has always been interested in medicine and genetics. After obtaining his PhD in Medical Molecular Genetics from the University of Illinois at Chicago, he went to the University of Washington to continue his studies in pediatrics. Todd's supervisor during his postdoctoral period was Rob Mitra, a co developer of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS). Rob Mitra studied under Professor George Church during his postdoctoral period and became a co developer of NGS at that time.
At the University of Washington, Dr. Todd witnessed researchers sequencing the entire genome of adult cancer patients for the first time. But he found that no one was engaged in related content in the field of pediatrics. Therefore, he became an intermediary between excellent genomics projects in universities and pediatric sub specialty research, and created his own academic research. Subsequently, Dr. Todd delved into the issues in pediatric oncology, such as the differences in the pathogenesis of childhood and adult cancer, their particularities, and the scarcity of funding and resources. Todd hopes to use targeted therapies to replace drugs developed in the early 1970s and 1980s for the treatment of children. Therefore, he hopes to develop molecular diagnostic techniques in this field to bring better childhood cancer care methods to the 21st century. Subsequently, combined with laboratory work, Dr. Todd attempted to develop a new diagnostic study for children with leukemia. Around 2016 or 2017, Dr. Todd learned about ArcherDX's unique chemical method, which can detect gene fusion and structural variations through batch analysis. Subsequently, Dr. Todd applied this technology to clinical trials. In 2019, Dr. Todd became the first CMO of ArcherDX company. Dr. Todd said, "I spent a wonderful time there, learned more about the industry, and discovered that the industry can play a very positive role in promoting patient care
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In order to continue promoting the development of personalized and precision medicine, Dr. Todd pursues the detection of multiple disease indicators on a higher resolution platform, hoping to obtain patient specific treatment information with minimal effort to help improve patient prognosis.
Mission Bio's Tapestri platform is the industry's first single-cell DNA and multi omics platform that can characterize the heterogeneity of cell populations and single-cell datasets, thereby helping to better understand and improve cancer.
Based on this, Dr. Todd joined Mission Bio to continue pursuing his dreams.
Using Tapestri platform to solve precision medicine problems
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Dr. Todd has put forward his own views on how to use the Tapestri platform to address the challenges faced in precision medicine. He said, 'In the trajectory of cancer progression in patients, the Tapestri platform can touch the patient's cancer diagnosis and treatment process at multiple different stages.'. In addition, we can also use the Tapestri platform to detect minimal residual lesions (MRD) in the blood, and we will explore MRD detection for solid tumors in the future.
Mission Bio collaborates with multiple companies to provide a product portfolio for research and production quality control of cell and gene therapy products based on different methods. Based on this, Mission Bio can provide corresponding support to clinical doctors to achieve dynamic detection of MRD and determine personalized therapy for patients with tumor recurrence.
Dr. Todd said:
Dr. Todd Druley, Chief Medical Officer of Mission Bio
The Tapestri platform can touch many different points in the same patient's' arc 'and provide different high-precision data in the process, which excites me a lot. ”
Tapestri is the only commercial device capable of utilizing a unique two-step microfluidic technology to simultaneously analyze DNA and other analytes (such as cell surface proteins) at the single-cell level.
Recent research shows that the use of high-resolution equipment is crucial to uncover the profound meaning of complex diseases such as breast cancer, non-small cell lung cancer, colorectal cancer and melanoma.
Tapestri enables researchers to simultaneously detect SNV and CNV at the single-cell level through scalable methods, providing insights into clone chimerism, tumor transformation, clone evolution, and metastatic transmission.
Tapestri, as an important tool for understanding treatment resistance, allows researchers to detect rare emerging clones in the early stages through reliable and highly sensitive heterozygous loss detection, understand how driver mutations increase over time, and observe the process of tumor escape and metastasis. The significance of single-cell multi omics analysis in precision cancer medicine is becoming increasingly important, as it can clearly display the clonal structure of tumors, promoting the development of combination therapy and personalized treatment.
