At the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) 2017 Annual Meeting, researchers and physicians from Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian presented updates on the use of organoids in neuroendocrine prostate cancer.
Dr. Mark Rubin, Director of the Englander Institute for Precision Medicine, spoke about functional testing to use organoids to determine drug sensitivity or resistance. We have previously shown the power of sophisticated genomic analysis, but the information obtained by extracting DNA or RNA from a sample is fixed in time. Organoids allow for testing of many different types of tumor processes or properties, including the examination of important cellular pathways and treatment sensitivity and resistance. For example, we can test certain drugs or drug combinations to see how well they work or don’t work on a specific tumor or tumor type. For instance, in a clinical trial to examine the response of men with neuroendocrine prostate cancer (NEPC) to a drug called alisertib, we took tissue biopsies before the patients started treatment. From these tissues, we developed organoids. We then used these organoids to test response to alisertib. Treating the organoids with the drug showed the same results as in the patients (one with an exceptional response and the other with treatment resistance).
Loredana Puca, PhD, a postdoctoral associate mentored by Drs. Beltran and Rubin, highlighted the similarities in the microscopic anatomy of the cells and tissues (also referred to as the histology) between the organoids and the original biopsy tissue at the 2017 AACR meeting. Additionally, she presented results showing how the tumor’s DNA (also referred to as the genomics), as well as way the cells encode RNA to create proteins (also referred to as transcriptomics) – both of which are integral to the tumor’s ability to grow and mutate – are similar between organoids and biopsy. This sets the stage to utilize organoids for diagnostic and treatment testing in the hopes that the results will be more analogous to human tumors than traditional cell-line work.
Learn more about this research by visiting Dr. Beltran’s lab website. For additional information about organoids and how they work check out this recent blog post.
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