For the first time scientists have grown 'tumours' from real cancer patients in a lab, an advance that could lead to truly personalised cancer therapies.
Three-dimensional cultures (or "organoids") derived from the tumours of cancer patients closely replicate key properties of the original tumours, researchers said.
These "organoid" cultures are amenable to large-scale drug screens for the detection of genetic changes associated with drug sensitivity and pave the way for personalised treatment approaches that could optimise clinical outcomes in cancer patients.
"This is the first time that a collection of cancer organoids, or a living biobank, has been derived from patient tumours," said senior study author Mathew Garnett, a geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
"We believe that these organoids are an important new tool in the arsenal of cancer biologists and may ultimately improve our ability to develop more effective cancer treatments," said Garnett.
To study the causes of cancer and develop new cancer treatments, many laboratories use experimental model systems such as cells grown from patient tumours.
However, currently available cell lines have been derived under suboptimal conditions and therefore fail to reflect important features of tumour cells.
As a result, it has been challenging to predict the drug sensitivity of individual patients based on their unique spectrum of genetic mutations.
In recent years, scientists have developed organoid cell culture systems as an alternative approach to grow normal and diseased tissue in a dish.
In contrast to cell lines, organoids display the hallmarks of the original tissue in terms of its 3D architecture, the cell types present, and their self-renewal properties.
Given the advantages of organoids, Garnett and Hans Clevers of the Hubrecht Institute in Netherlands set out to test whether these cultures could potentially bridge the gap between cancer genetics and patient outcomes.
In the new study, the researchers grew 22 organoids derived from tumour tissue from 20 patients with colorectal cancer and then sequenced genomic DNA isolated from these cultures.
The genetic mutations in the organoid cultures closely matched those in the corresponding tumour biopsies and agreed well with previous large-scale analyses of colorectal cancer mutations.
These findings confirm that the cultures faithfully capture the genomic features of the tumours from which they are derived as well as much of the genomic diversity associated with colorectal cancer.
To link drug sensitivity to genetic changes, the researchers next screened the responses of the organoids to 83 experimental and approved cancer drugs.
The study was published in the journal Cell.
