CIVO Intratumoural Microdosing of Anti-Cancer Therapies in Australia

CIVO is a research tool composed of a hand-held single-use sterile injector coupled with fluorescent tracking microspheres called CIVO GLO that mark the sites of drug microdose injection, enabling rapid assessment of multiple oncology drugs or drug combinations simultaneously within a patient's tumour. Tumour responses to cancer treatments are highly context-specific and often involve complex interactions between the anti-cancer therapy, genetically diverse tumour cells, and a heterogeneous TME. This complexity is rarely modeled accurately in preclinical translational models of cancer. By utilizing intratumoural microdose injections with CIVO in advance of scheduled surgical intervention, this study will evaluate anti-cancer therapies directly in patients each with their own unique tumour genomic profile, intact TME, and immune system functional status. Because the platform delivers microdose amounts of each test agent or combination directly into the patient's tumour tissue, hypotheses can be tested earlier in the drug development process. The CIVO device penetrates solid tumours and simultaneously delivers subtherapeutic microdoses of up to eight anti-cancer agents or combinations of anti-cancer agents co-injected with CIVO GLO into discrete regions of the tumour as drug columns. At the time of the planned surgical intervention (at least four hours to up to seven days after the CIVO microdose injection), the injected tumour tissue is then excised and tumour responses are assessed via histological staining of tumour cross-sections sampled perpendicular to each injection column. Co-injection with CIVO GLO enables identification of each injection site during resection as well as in tissues stained for analysis. This Phase 0 Master Protocol is aimed at distinguishing promising candidates earlier in the drug development process while also avoiding systemic toxicities associated with typical clinical exposures to these therapies.