Predictive value of ex vivo biodynamic imaging in determining response to chemotherapy in dogs with spontaneous non-Hodgkin's lymphomas: a preliminary study.

Biodynamic imaging (BDI) is a novel phenotypic cancer profiling technology which optically characterizes changes in subcellular motion within living tumor tissue samples in response to ex vivo treatment with cancer chemotherapy drugs. The purpose of this preliminary study was to assess the ability of ex vivo BDI to predict in vivo clinical response to chemotherapy in ten dogs with naturally-occurring non-Hodgkin's lymphomas. Pre-treatment tumor biopsy samples were obtained from all dogs and treated ex vivo with doxorubicin (10 μM). BDI measured six dynamic biomarkers of subcellular motion from all biopsy samples at baseline and at regular intervals for 9 h following drug application. All dogs subsequently received doxorubicin to treat their lymphomas. Best overall response to and progression-free survival time following chemotherapy were recorded for all dogs. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were used to determine accuracy and identify possible cut-off values for the BDI-measured biomarkers which could accurately predict those dogs' cancers that would and would not respond to doxorubicin chemotherapy. One biomarker (designated 'MEM') showed 100% discriminative capability for predicting clinical response to doxorubicin (area under the ROC curve = 1.00, 95% CI 0.692-1.000), while other biomarkers also showed promising predictive capability. These preliminary findings suggest that ex vivo BDI can accurately predict treatment outcome following doxorubicin chemotherapy in a spontaneous animal cancer model, and is worthy of further investigation as a technology for personalized cancer medicine.