Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
In what is being hailed as a step forward in the search for personalized cancer treatments, genetics experts from the UK’s Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and an international team of colleagues have reportedly grown miniature organs out of living cancer tissue.
The researchers, who published their findings Thursday in the journal Cell, took colon cancer cells from people afflicted with the disease and used them to grow organoids – smaller, simpler versions of actual working organs. This made it possible to design tailor-made therapies.
As Gizmodo explained, the researchers grew miniature tumors similar to the original tumors. With these they were able to determine which drugs would be most effective at fighting cancer in each individual. Like each person, each tumor as a unique genome, the website explained, and the genetics of the cancer determines how it reacts to different medications.
“Tumor organoids are amenable to high-throughput drug screens allowing detection of gene-drug associations,” the authors wrote. They added that organoid technology could potentially “fill the gap between cancer genetics and patient trials, complement cell-line and xenograft-based drug studies, and allow personalized therapy design.”
Organoids more effective than growing cell cultures
While researchers have narrowed down which genetic mutations lead to cancers of the intestinal lining, it’s a long list and they need to find a way to narrow it down. The organoids serve as a superior model for testing drugs than widely used methods relying upon the growing of tumor cell cultures in a Petri dish.
Those cell cultures, the website explained, lack the same diverse mix of cell types found in actual tumor cells. While doctors can sequence the genomes of cells in a Petri dish, they find it difficult to use those cultures to predict how a specific patient’s tumor will react to a particular drug.
To address the issue, Sanger Institute geneticist Mathew Garnett and his colleagues created 22 cancer organoids based on cultures obtained from 20 patients, and found that the DNA of those miniature organs were a close match to biopsies taken from the original tumors. They tested 83 different cancer drugs on the tumors and recorded the cancer’s response to each.
As it turned out, each tumor was sensitive to different drugs than the others, which prompted the authors to conclude that these organoids could prove to be a reliable way to develop personalized treatment plans for each individual patient’s tumor. Furthermore, they could also be an effective, platform for drug testing that bridges the gap between genetic studies and patient trials.
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