Descripción del proyecto
One of the biggest limitations in developing new treatments for cutaneous melanoma relies on overcoming the inefficient screening, often to animal models, which greatly differ from humans. Also, the 3Rs principle limits the number of therapeutics that actually reach the in vivo evaluation of product/drug development or discovery. Thus, there is a high demand for novel pre-clinical platforms, as alternative models to the use of animals, that can screening new treatments. I propose the establishment of a multicompartmental melanoma graft model based on an ex vivo skin tissue grafted with a multicellular spheroid composed by melanoma cells, keratinocytes and monocytes. The ex vivo melanoma graft model, called SkinModelOma, will be a major breakthrough in the study of melanoma tumor growth and on the effectiveness of new therapies in different types of skin and considering gender and age. To the best of my knowledge, this will be the first ex vivo melanoma graft model, and the first model for skin cancer considering age, gender and skin type as important parameters in novel therapies screening for skin cancer. This proposal includes 3 scientific work packages related to 3 objectives and includes transversal work packages related to my training and improviment as a researcher. The objectives are based in the development and standardization of multicellular spheroid, their graft in the human skin and the validation of this model as a screening platform. I believed that the SkinModelOma proposed here will contribute to significant scientific advances in cutaneous melanoma patients’ management and also to great international recognition that will enable other researchers to benefit from a novel pre-clinical tool.