Despite their growth out of control in cancer patients, most tumors do not survive in dishes lab long enough for doctors or researchers to study their effectiveness. Now a team took the intestinal cancerous tissue of people and grown miniature human gut which retain the properties of the original tumor, an advance that may help identify better, or more personalized, treatments for colon cancer. There
several years, Hans Clevers of Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and colleagues have developed a way to grow stem cells in intestinal miniature organelles in the intestinal tissue laboratory. With a combination of growth factors and gellike environments, researchers can coax the cells to form cell aggregates approximately 0.1 mm in diameter with a hollow center and the folded signatures crypts that form the wall of the intestine. Organelles can be kept alive in the laboratory for years, and they can also survive freezing and thawing.
Now, with colleagues from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, and the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Dutch team has adapted the technique to cancer. Researchers have increased tissue mini tripe taken from tumor samples from 27 patients with colorectal cancer. The technique is surprisingly effective, more organelles of up to 0% of patient samples, reports the team today cell .
To see how the mini-guts looked like tumors, the researchers sequenced the genomes of organelles. Although the match was not perfect, the mini-guts had many of the same cancer-causing mutations found in the sample of the original tumor. The tumors are often composed of several types of cells bearing different pools of mutations. And in that part of the tumor of a sample came, an organoid may not include all types present in patient cells. Nevertheless, "they capture most, if not all of the most important changes," says Eduard Batlle at the Biomedical Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain.
The technique has advantages over the two techniques leading to the study of tumors of patients: the creation of immortal cell lines and transplantation of human cancer cells into mice, explains Alberto Bardelli from the Institute for research and treatment of cancer in Candiolo, Italy lines. of immortal cells frequently acquire new mutations in their adaptation to growth in culture, and so they are less accurate model of cancer, said Bardelli. tumors transplanted into immunodeficient mice, called xenografts, are more accurate, but they are expensive and difficult to maintain. "Xenos are wonderful, but you can not do large-scale [drug] screening on xenos," he said.
with cancer organelles, by contrast, researchers were able to test more than 80 drugs and could measure the sensitivity of mini-guts were each compound. The mini-guts "fill a critical gap," Bardelli said. "It's very exciting."
Clevers said two clinical trials are already evaluating the usefulness of mini-cancerous guts. The first tests how an organoid created from a person newly diagnosed with colorectal cancer can predict tumor response to treatment. a second will verify if the organelles can help identify combinations of drugs effective in people whose cancer has spread in several tissues.
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