Patient stratification

Successful clinical trials need good patient stratification

Clinical trials fail for several reasons, with efficacy and safety being commonly cited reasons. But another issue may be due to a lack of proper patient stratification. In addition to obvious parameters, patients may need to be stratified in a manner that reflects the pathogenic diversity seen within a disease or by their response to a candidate drug. The reliance on humanized transgenic animal models, coupled with a lack of proper patient stratification, is likely working to reduce the success of clinical trials.

Cells derived from human iPSCs can help stratify patients

Clinical trials in a dish, that use human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) derived cells, offer a more human approach to screening and modeling and represent a diverse source of patients with multiple disease-relevant phenotypes. Candidate drugs can be tested in a broad selection of human iPSC derived cells from patients with the same disease but perhaps different variations or underlying causes. This serves to robustly identify responders versus nonresponders.

Our axoCells^TM are available from Alzheimer’s disease patients but with different mutations, for example. You can use axoCells^TM to uncover drug responses in a population and build relevant patient stratification schemes ahead of clinical trials. This would contribute to more efficient clinical trials, reducing rates of attrition, and speeding up the move from bench to bedside.