Clinical Trial News – PEAR-TREE 2

Exploring how to match treatments to patients

Patients with advanced or metastatic kidney cancer now have a range of options in terms of drug treatment. However, at the moment, we don’t know which drugs might work better for which patient.

Pear-Bio is a UK-based biotech company that has developed a system that takes a fresh biopsy from the tumour, splits it into equal parts, and places each part in a separate 3D culture. They then grow these, leaving one without treatment, and treating the others with different drugs that might be used. Their hope is that their system can be used to predict which patients will respond to which drugs. Their best developed work so far has been in breast cancer, but they have been running a small clinical trial in kidney cancer.

However, they will be launching a much larger trial, PEAR-TREE 2, shortly. This trial will be open in multiple sites in the UK, and later in the USA. It will be open to any patient with advanced or metastatic kidney cancer who will be starting a new line of treatment with immunotherapy/ targeted therapy.

Patients need to have an additional biopsy, and donate 40ml of blood. They then have treatment as standard, and the study compares what happens to patients with what happens to samples in the Pear-Bio system.

Although patients will not directly benefit from taking part in the trial, Pear-Bio will provide the readout from its assay to the clinical team after a time period, and any data they have one tumour genetic abnormalities, for example.

They hope to open the trial in late 2023, and recruit patients for 2 years.

Patients who would like to take part in the trial should check HERE to find their nearest trial site.

For further information on all clinical trials please visit our Clinical Trials page HERE