New test aids personalized Cancer care

In a highly successful, first-of-its-kind endeavor, a multidisciplinary team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers has created a "tumor in a dish:" an ex vivo microenvironment that can accurately anticipate a multiple myeloma patient's response to a drug.

The advance could mean a giant step forward in efforts to tailor medical treatment plans to individual patients.

Led by Shigeki Miyamoto, a professor of oncology at UW-Madison, and David Beebe, the John D. MacArthur Professor and Claude Bernard professor of biomedical engineering at UW-Madison, the researchers published news of the advance in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Integrative Biology."We're taking the first steps toward mimicking the body in a dish," Beebe says.

Much of the research was led by Chorom Pak, who previously was a graduate student working in Miyamoto's lab. Researchers produced an assay, or testing process, which involves co-culturing multiple myeloma tumor cells with their surrounding non-tumor cells, all from the same patient, in a microscale petri dish. The researchers then treated the tumor cells with Bortezomib, a drug commonly used in multiple myeloma therapy. And after only three days, the researchers could determine whether the drug was effective, or not. The new assay could save many multiple myeloma cancer patients the psychological stress of having to try multiple drugs until they find the most effective one. The assay reduces clinicians' need for this trial-and-error approach while treating a patient, and it also lowers the cost of treatment.