Scientists have created the world’s first “living biobank”
of patients’ tumors and used the tissue to identify the most promising
drugs for each person’s disease. Tiny biopsies of the patients’ tumors were grown into
clumps of cells and kept alive in the lab, so researchers could study
their specific mutations and subject the tumors to more than 80
anti-cancer drugs.
Geneticists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in
Cambridge said the work marked a step towards more personalized medical
treatments that target cancer tumor by tumor in individual patients.The researchers grew what they call 3D organoids from both
cancerous and healthy tissue biopsies taken from 20 patients with bowel
cancer. All of the patients had received surgery to remove their tumors
and were not having further treatment.
“The beautiful thing here is that we’ve shown we can grow
these organoids in the lab and they look a lot like the tissue from
which they were taken, so they should be much better models for studying
cancer,” said Mathew Garnett, a researcher at the Sanger Institute.
“This opens up amazing opportunities to ask questions about
the biology of the patients’ tumors, the genetics of their tumors, and
to see how that patient might respond to different cancer drugs,” he
added. About 41,000 people in the UK are diagnosed with bowel cancer each year.
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