Lab-grown cancer ‘tumour’ heralds future treatment progress

A team of scientists in the UK has grown miniature “tumours” from real cancer patients in the laboratory which closely match the actual disease growing in their bodies.

Called organoids the balls of tumour cells could be an important step towards truly personalised cancer therapies in future.

The work published today in the science journal Cell looked at colon cancers from 20 anonymous patients. Individual cells from their tumours were placed in a special 3-D growth matrix in the lab. These cells went on to grow into cancerous gut tissue very similar to that found in the patients.

“This is the first time a collection of cancer organoids, or a living biobank, has been derived from patient tumours,” said Dr Matthew Garnet who led the research at the Wellcome Trust’s Sanger Institute in Cambridgeshire.

Tests on the genetic mutations in the cancers revealed they were 80 per cent similar to the patients cancer.

Individual variations

Screening the organoids against 83 experimental and existing cancer drugs showed exactly which tumours would be best treated with which drugs.

Picture courtesy Marc van de Wetering, Hubrecht Institute for Developmental Biology

And that’s important. Increasingly cancer treatments are tailored to an individual’s cancer. But even if patients have the same type of cancer, different genetic mutations mean individual cancers respond in very different ways to cancer drugs.

A lab-grown organoid from a tumour biopsy could immediately reveal a tumour’s genetic strengths and weaknesses.

Some researchers think in future all cancer patients may have their cancers grown outside their body in this way to guide their therapy.

Phenomenal progress

But the team at the Sanger believe that may turn out to be unnecessary. Large collections of cancer organoids could allow new drugs or combinations of drugs to be tested to match any given patient’s tumour type.

A patient’s cancer could then be genetically sequenced and “matched” to the most similar cancer type from this organoids biobank to ensure it can be killed.

There are already 2 clinical trials in the UK for lung and bowel cancer which are sequencing individual patient’s tumours.

“The pace at which this is accelerating is just phenomenal”, said Dr Ultan McDermott, an oncologist at the Sanger Institute, “I think within the next couple of years we will have organoids coming onto the scene and that information on how they respond to treatment will make those trials even more possible.”