Lab-grown mini tumors could help identify personalized treatments for people with rare cancers

UCLA scientists have developed a new method to quickly screen hundreds of drugs in order to identify treatments that can target specific tumors.The approach could help scientists understand how a person ’s tumor would respond to a certain drug or drug combination, and it could help guide treatment decisions for people with rare and hard-to-treat cancers. Apaper detailing the new technique was published in Communications Biology.“We always focus on how we need new and better drugs to treat cancer,” said Alice Soragni, the senior author of the study and a scientist at the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. “While that’s true, we also have many drugs currently available — for most of them, we just haven’t been able to figure out who is going to respond to which ones.”The screening method uses patients ’ own cells, collected during surgery, to create miniature tumor organoids. Organoids are simpler, smaller versions of bodily organs or tumors that scientists can grow in a lab to replicate the full-function structures; researchers create them to study diseases and possible treatments.“We obtain cancer cells directly from surgery and that same day we can seed them to generate tumor organoids,” said Soragni, an assistant professor in the division of hematology/oncology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and member of the Molecular Biology Institute at UCLA. “We created a miniaturized system that allows the setup of hundreds of wells for...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news