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Human Colon Organoids and Other Laboratory Strategies to Enhance Patient Treatment Selection

  • Lower Gastrointestinal Cancers (AB Benson, Section Editor)
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Opinion statement

Though many advancements in personalized medicine have been made, better methods are still needed to predict treatment benefit for patients with colorectal cancer. Patient-derived cancer organoids (PDCOs) are a major advance towards true personalization of treatment strategies. A growing body of literature is demonstrating the feasibility of PDCOs as an accurate and high-throughput preclinical tool for patient treatment selection. Many studies demonstrate that these cultures are readily generated and represent the tumors they were derived from phenotypically and based on their mutation profile. This includes maintenance of the driver muatations giving the cancer cells a selective growth advantage, and also heterogeneity, including molecular and metabolic heterogeneity. Additionally, PDCOs are now being utilized to develop patient biospecimen repositories, perform high to moderate-throughput drug screening, and to potentially predict treatment response for individual patients that are undergoing anti-cancer treatments. In order to develop PDCOs as a true clinical tool, further studies are required to determine the reproducibility and accuracy of these models to predict patient response.

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Funding

This project was supported by NIH P30 CA014520 (Core Grant, University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center), and the NIH grant R37 CA226526.

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  1. Division of Hematology and Oncology, Department of Medicine, University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1111 Highland Avenue, Madison, WI, 53705, USA

    Katherine A. Johnson BS, Rebecca A. DeStefanis BA, Philip B. Emmerich BA, Patrick T. Grogan MD PhD, Jeremy D. Kratz MD, Sarbjeet K. Makkar PhD & Dustin A. Deming MD

  2. McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research, Department of Oncology, University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1111 Highland Avenue, Madison, WI, 53705, USA

    Katherine A. Johnson BS, Rebecca A. DeStefanis BA, Philip B. Emmerich BA, Patrick T. Grogan MD PhD, Jeremy D. Kratz MD, Sarbjeet K. Makkar PhD, Linda Clipson BA & Dustin A. Deming MD

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Katherine A. Johnson declares that she has no conflict of interest. Rebecca A. DeStefanis declares that she has no conflict of interest. Philip B. Emmerich declares that he has no conflict of interest. Patrick T. Grogan declares that he has no conflict of interest. Jeremy D. Kratz declares that he has no conflict of interest. Sarbjeet K. Makkar declares that he has no conflict of interest. Linda Clipson declares that she has no conflict of interest. Dustin A. Deming declares that he have no conflict of interest.

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Johnson, K.A., DeStefanis, R.A., Emmerich, P.B. et al. Human Colon Organoids and Other Laboratory Strategies to Enhance Patient Treatment Selection. Curr. Treat. Options in Oncol. 21, 35 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11864-020-00737-9

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