VAN DE WETERING ET AL./CELL 2015To more faithfully recapitulate cancers in the lab, researchers have built upon existing methods for creating three-dimensional intestines in a dish to grow these so-called organoids out of tumor samples. The scientists used tissue from 20 colorectal cancer patients to create 22 tumor-derived organoids and 19 organoids from the patients’ normal intestinal tissue.
“This is the first time that a collection of cancer organoids, or a living biobank, has been derived from patient tumors,” study coauthor Mathew Garnett, a geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, said in a press release. “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.”
Currently, cells lines and xenotransplantation of tumors into mice are the best methods for studying cancers in the laboratory. But cell lines offer only a short-term glimpse of the cancer, and mouse models can be resource-intensive, the authors wrote in their report, published in Cell last week (May 7).
Garnett and his colleagues analyzed genetic mutations of the cancerous ...
