Seed Funding Program 2023
MIRA@MA
DKFZ-Hector Minimally Invasive Rapid Autopsy Program
Coordinators
dkfz.de
Sebastian Schölch
DKFZ Hector Junior Clinical Cooperation Unit Translational Surgical Oncology, UMM
dkfz.de
Andreas Trumpp
Stem Cells and Cancer, DKFZ
Detailed description
A significant problem in late-stage cancer treatment is therapy resistance and differential treatment responses among distinct tumor lesions. This is a result of inter- and intratumoral heterogeneity. Due to very limited availability of biopsy samples from late-stage patients, this phenomenon is still incompletely understood.
The MIRA@MA program aims to establish a Minimally Invasive Rapid Autopsy (MIRA) program at the DKFZ Hector Cancer Institute. This program will generate post-therapeutic and multi-lesional biopsy samples by obtaining ultrasound-guided core biopsies from multiple tumor sites of recently deceased cancer patients, who have given their written consent to enrollment in this study before. The samples will undergo single-cell multiomic analyses and will be archived as live organoid lines in the DKFZ Morszeck Biobank and facilitate research into differential treatment responses and clonal evolution in late-stage cancer. Furthermore, the initiative includes a comprehensive training component for medical students, who will receive specialized training in ultrasound-guided biopsy techniques. This will ensure the program's sustainability and foster the next generation of clinician scientists. The MIRA program has been approved by the ethics committee II of Heidelberg University and aims to enroll patients with gastrointestinal, hepatobiliary, gynecologic, urologic, and pulmonary malignancies.
Illustration: Potential biopsy sites in the MIRA program.