Scientists have successfully developed organs to rebuild liver cancer

On February 13th, the liver cancer is one of the leading causes of death among cancer patients worldwide. Currently, there is no approved therapy. The main challenge in developing effective drugs for treating liver cancer is that the current tumor model does not accurately reflect human tumors and tumors. The nature of the surrounding environment often causes many potential drugs to fail in clinical testing; to more accurately mimic these properties, the researchers developed a liver cancer model called human-derived tumor xenograft (PDX), although These models provide specific information on how effective potential cancer drugs work in the human body, but these drugs are expensive and time-consuming to develop, and the cost of culturing these PDX cancer cells in the culture medium for drug screening is also high. Attempts by researchers at these times often do not reflect the structure of 3-D tumors and the microenvironment of the tumor.

Recently, a research report published in the international magazine Biomaterials, scientists from the A*STAR Institute in Singapore designed a new method to grow PDX liver cancer cells for drug screening and detection; It mainly consists of growing cells on a synthetic 3-D scaffold made of vegetable porous hydrogel. The researchers then engineered the sponge scaffold with optimized biochemical and mechanical properties to help the liver cancer cells maintain proper shape and function. And make it grow like a organ.

When the organ grows for one to three weeks, the researchers found that the liver cancer cells in the organoids survive and multiply. The liver cancer cells usually contain special genetic changes that are not found in normal liver cells, and the researchers then came from 14 patients with liver cancer. The organoids in the transferred PDX are engineered, and most of the organs can maintain the same genetic changes in the PDX source cells while maintaining internal tumor heterogeneity, which can effectively distinguish the same tumor tissue. The presence of liver cancer cell populations also affects their response to therapy. The existence of this feature is another advantage of drug screening, that is, organ-like organs have advantages over traditional cell culture.

Now researchers have found that engineered organoids have important value. Another attractive advantage is that the 3-D scaffolds containing organoids are small, only 100 microns; researchers can easily place them In 96-well plates, high-throughput drug screening can be performed simultaneously with drug testing; by this technique, a PDX model can be used to generate tens to hundreds of such special scaffolds, which can be combined to describe the original The genetic characteristics and heterogeneity of liver tumors may make it possible to completely change the screening and development of liver cancer drugs.

Finally, researcher Toh said that having a reliable platform to grow cancer cells from liver cancer patients is an important step forward in the development of personalized therapy today, and we can now also increase the throughput of drug susceptibility testing; This sponge scaffold maintains normal liver cell growth while maintaining the important properties of liver cancer for drug testing, which may be expected to help select the best treatment based on the drug test results of the patient's liver cancer cells.