ORION Flagship, FHNW School of Life Sciences

The Innosuisse flagship ORION will build a smart microfactory to foster personalized cancer treatments. Using tumour-specific inputs, such as patient data and tissue, the ORION microfactory will autonomously produce tumour models by continuously adjusting their cellular composition and microenvironment to closely mirror well-characterised tumour samples from patients.

Model optimisation will be driven by a combination of closed-loop feedback from integrated sensors and discrete measurements, such as sequencing. The most accurate models will be validated using past treatment data, then expanded and tested against selected therapeutic agents.

To ensure safety, experts from the FHNW's Cell biology and in vitro toxicology group are contributing to work package 4, where they are assessing potential toxic effects of new therapies on organ models including liver, lung, and kidney.

The project aims to identify new biomarkers, accelerate drug discovery, better identify promising therapies for clinical trials, and in the long run, lead to digital “tumour twins” that simulate how patients might respond.