NYSCF Women’s Reproductive Cancers Initiative

Women’s Reproductive Cancers FAQs

Meet the PI 

Laura Andres-Martin, PhD
Senior Research Investigator, Oncology
The NYSCF Research Institute

Laura Andres-Martin, PhD, is the founding Principal Investigator for the NYSCF Women’s Reproductive Cancers Initiative, which aims to shift paradigms in the way women’s cancers are studied and treated. Her team has built a growing biobank of ovarian cancer patient samples to fuel the discovery of precision therapies, and she hopes her work will help accelerate solutions for those suffering from this understudied disease.

Dr. Andres-Martin received her PhD from the University of Salamanca in Spain where she worked on deciphering the role of NTRK1 variants in cancer and rare disorders. She then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Weill Cornell Medicine, focusing on neurodegenerative disorders and stem cell competition mechanisms in adult stem cells. In 2015, she was awarded a NYSCF – Druckenmiller Postdoctoral Fellowship and has been an integral member of the NYSCF community ever since.

Email: landresmartin@nyscf.org 

Scientific Advisory Board

The Initiative is guided by a Scientific Advisory Board of world-leading experts. Current members include:

Name	Image
	Carol Aghajanian, MD Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
	Michael Birrer, MD, PhD The University of Alabama at Birmingham
	George Coukos, MD, PhD University of Lausanne
	Susan M. Domchek, MD University of Pennsylvania
	Ronny Drapkin, MD, PhD University of Pennsylvania
	Olivier Elemento, PhD Weill Cornell Medicine
	Ramez Eskander, MD University of California, San Diego
	Carla Grandori, MD, PhD SEngine Precision Medicine
	Carl June, MD University of Pennsylvania
	Ursula Matulonis, MD Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
	Kathleen Moore, MD University of Oklahoma
	Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD, DPhil Columbia University
	Alessandro Santin, MD Yale University
	Elizabeth M. Swisher, MD University of Washington
	Irving Weissman, MD Stanford Medicine
	Oliver Zivanovic, MD, PhD Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Special Advisor:

Name	Image
	Hans Clevers, MD, PhD  Hubrecht Institute

For Scientists

Goals & Approach

For the most part, cancer is still treated with a one-size-fits-all approach (i.e. chemotherapies), but recent scientific breakthroughs are starting to enable tailored treatments that bring precision medicine approaches to the oncology space. Genomic-guided treatments have provided significant benefits to certain patients with varying ranges of success depending on the tumor type/alteration, but on average these approaches have only benefited less than 10% of patients. We need precision therapies driven by function, not just genetics, and organoids offer an ideal model for this. Tumor organoids are made from stem cells present in the tumor tissue and grown in 3D: they can recapitulate each patient’s tumor biology, including preliminary evidence of predicting responses to therapy. 

Our work focuses on ovarian cancer, due to its extensive unmet need. Over 100,000 women in the United States are diagnosed with reproductive cancers each year, and over 32,000 women die annually from these cancers. We leverage tumor organoids to address the following goals:

1. To build a biobank of clinically and genetically diverse organoid models from ovarian cancer patients as community resource

2. To use organoids as models to predict responses to therapies and find tumor-specific therapeutic vulnerabilities

3. To use organoids as a platform to accelerate the clinical development of candidate emerging therapies, like immunotherapies and combinatorial strategies

4. To leverage NYSCF’s world-leading automation to develop scalable assays for organoid therapeutic sensitivities. Automated methods significantly decrease technical variability, bringing reproducibility, robustness, and replicability to our assays while enabling scale and increased efficiency so that tumor-organoid based screenings can be readily adapted to large scale capabilities such as mid-/high-throughput screenings.

5. To ultimately enable the preclinical adoption of organoids-based therapy screening assays

Achievements

1. Establishing highly efficient/robust methods for ovarian organoid derivation across subtypes

2. Building an ovarian cancer organoid biobank representing the most frequent ovarian cancer subtypes that is continuously expanding and available for community as resource

3. Establishing fully automated mid-throughput drug screening assays 

4. Establishing a co-culture system with Natural Killer (NK) cells and 3D live-cell imaging killing assays to study and optimize responses to NK-cell based immunotherapies

5. Identification of a Taurine-mediated mechanism that suppress ovarian cancer cell growth and support the emergence of cells resistant to chemotherapy

Abilities & Resources

1. Establishment of organoids cultures and biobanking from patients tumor resections 

2. Histological and genomic characterization in matching primary tumor/organoid pairs

3. Mycoplasma testing in tumor organoid cultures

4. Organoid based in vitro assays such as proliferation and flow cytometry

5. Fully automated organoid-based drug testing 

6. Evaluation of cytotoxic activity of  NK-cell based immunotherapies

Publications

Ovarian Cancer: Towards Personalizing Ovarian Cancer Treatments Using Patient-Derived Organoids
Tatiana Volpari, Jacqueline Hebner, Raeka S. Aiyar, Laura A. Martin. Comprehensive Pharmacology. 2022. DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-12-820472-6.00080-3