3-D Pancreatic Cancer Tumors Grown In Petri Dish Help Toward Cure For Pancreatic Cancer

Researchers have a created new method to grow three-dimensional organ-buds, known as organoid cultures, of pancreatic tumors from surgical tissues in patients, according to a study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

"We have now developed a new methodology to grow human pancreatic tumor cells from surgical tissues and have demonstrated that these tumor organoids recreate both morphology and biology of the cancer tissue in the patient," Dr. Senthil Muthuswamy, director of the Cell Biology Program in the Cancer Research Institute at BIDMC, who conducted the study, said in a news release.

This new study will enable researchers to develop new types of therapies and drugs. They will also be able to test drug responses and personalize new forms of treatment in a timely and cost-efficient approach.

The 3-D organoids are basically miniature tumors in a petri dish, which have the same properties as tumors found in patients. This will allow the researchers understand the biological process of tissue development and cancer growth.

"We can begin to understand why some patients respond to a treatment while others do not and can thereby avoid giving patients unnecessary or ineffective treatments. This approach could help assist patients and their oncologists in making treatment decisions," Muthuswamy said.

For the past 15 years, Muthuswamy's lab has been growing normal and cancer derived cells from human breast as 3-D organoids.

"These new pancreatic progenitor organoids and tumor organoids can be used to model pancreatic cancer and for drug screening to identify precision therapy strategies," said Pier Paolo Pandolfi, MD, PhD, Director of the BIDMC Cancer Center.

The findings of this study were reported in the advance online issue of the journal Nature Medicine.

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