Researchers create personalized organ model for rare spine cancer

A new study adds to a growing body of evidence that organoids (lab-grown collections of cells that mimic a patient's tumor) are a promising avenue of drug discovery to improve outcomes for patients with cancer, especially rare of cancers, which often lack clinical data on drug efficacy

Organoids are grown in the lab from tissue cells collected from patients during surgery

In the new study, published online Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, researchers led by Soragni obtained seven tumor samples from five patients with the rare bone cancer chordoma, which This type of cancer has few treatment options

"We really need clinically relevant, personalized models to find treatments for chordoma and many other rare cancers," said Soragni, assistant professor in the Department of Plastic Surgery and a member of the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center

In the new study, the researchers succeeded in creating living organoids from all samples

The researchers then used the organoids for high-throughput drug screening, an automated drug discovery process that allows a large number of potential treatments to be tested simultaneously, rather than one at a time, significantly accelerating the development and testing of potential targets and drugs

Through screening, the authors identified several drug targets and biological pathways that could potentially be used in the treatment of chordoma

"We have demonstrated that patient-derived tumor organoids we develop can efficiently screen hundreds of drugs using our platform, and now include machine learning approaches to study organoid growth patterns and pathway analysis to find possible targeted biological processes

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Personalized chordoma organoids for drug discovery studies