Tel Aviv, Israel – April 2025 — CURESPONSE Ltd. is pleased to announce that the European Patent Office (EPO) has granted a new patent recognizing the company’s pioneering use of its proprietary cRESPONSE™ ex vivo organ culture (EVOC) platform to discover and validate novel, patient-specific therapeutic strategies in cancer.
The patent protects the use of a newly identified MEK–Src inhibitor combination in colorectal cancer (CRC), discovered through functional testing on live human tumor samples using the cRESPONSE platform. This dual-targeting approach demonstrated robust efficacy across multiple patient-derived samples, offering a promising new treatment strategy for a disease that continues to pose major clinical challenges.
Breakthrough Validated in Nature Cancer
The patented innovation builds on findings published in Nature Cancer by Gavert et al., where the cRESPONSE platform was used to screen and evaluate top-performing drug combinations in resected CRC tumors. Five candidate therapies were tested in parallel, and combined inhibition of MEK and Src signaling (using selumetinib and bosutinib) emerged as the most effective, inducing significant tumor cell death in approximately 50% of patient samples.
This efficacy was supported by molecular pathway analyses of ex vivo samples demonstrating pre-treatment and on-treatment biomarkers of response.
These findings not only establish the MEK–Src combination as a promising therapeutic option for selected CRC patients, but also demonstrate how cRESPONSE can identify tumor-specific vulnerabilities in a clinically actionable timeframe.
A New Frontier in Personalized Oncology
Colorectal cancer remains one of the most lethal malignancies worldwide, with limited success from targeted therapies and a five-year survival rate of just 15% in advanced disease. While MEK and Src pathways have each been studied independently, their combined inhibition in functionally selected patients represents a new and more effective approach.
The granted patent enables clinical integration of this combination via cRESPONSE, allowing physicians to evaluate patient-specific tumor sensitivity to MEK–Src inhibition as part of CURESPONSE’s commercial assay offering. This enhances therapeutic precision while minimizing unnecessary toxicity from ineffective treatments.
Strategic Value for Pharma & Drug Development
Beyond its clinical applications, the EPO patent reinforces the broader potential of the cRESPONSE platform to serve as a drug discovery and development engine. By replicating human tumor behavior ex vivo and identifying functional biomarkers of response, cRESPONSE enables pharmaceutical companies to:
- De-risk early-stage programs
- Identify lead candidates with higher translational potential
- Pair experimental drugs with ready-to-use companion diagnostics
- Reduce reliance on less predictive preclinical models
CURESPONSE is currently working with multiple global biopharma partners to integrate cRESPONSE into target prioritization, mechanism-of-action studies, and patient enrichment strategies across diverse oncology pipelines.
How the Discovery Was Made
The cRESPONSE platform cultured freshly resected CRC tumors in a patient-specific ex vivo system that preserves tissue architecture, viability, and microenvironment. Drug combinations identified from in vitro screens were applied to these EVOC samples, and response was measured by histological scoring and cancer cell viability. Among the tested regimens, MEK and Src inhibition (selumetinib + bosutinib) consistently produced the strongest effects.
Further analysis using immunohistochemistry revealed that high pSrc expression correlated with treatment response, demonstrating the platform’s ability to identify both effective drug regimens and their associated predictive biomarkers.
About CURESPONSE
CURESPONSE is a precision oncology company developing and commercializing cRESPONSE™, a breakthrough ex vivo platform that predicts treatment response by testing therapies directly on patient tumor samples. Used both in clinical care and drug development, the platform provides functional, human-relevant data to guide therapeutic decisions and accelerate the development of effective cancer therapies.