The Use of Stem Cell-Derived Organoids in Cancer Treatment Research

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. While some forms of cancer are more manageable and nonfatal with treatments like chemotherapy and radiation, other forms are not as manageable and have high fatality rates, such as colorectal cancer. Colorectal cancer most commonly occurs in elderly adults but has the potential to occur at any age. Due to its sometimes-undetectable symptoms, it is often diagnosed at a very late stage. Once diagnosed, there are different levels of treatment. For example, surgical resection, chemotherapy, radiation, or any combination of the three can occur. When tumors are unresectable, patients are often left with little chance of survival, and receive only the extension of survival for a short period of time. While surgical resection, chemotherapy and radiation have had success in some patients, high recurrence rates and a lack of response to treatments have left patients and researchers looking for new treatments that will result in better survival rates for patients. Researchers have begun to answer the calls for new treatments with the discovery of patient-derived organoids. Patient-derived organoids are harvested from adult stem cells in the desired tissue, or from cancer cells in a patient’s tumor. The cells taken from the patient are then grown ex-vivo in conditions that mimic the inside of the body. Organoids have grown to show both structural and physiological similarities to their parent organ. While organoids have not yet grown to be as large and highly vascularized as their parent organ, they have been useful in disease modeling and drug therapy testing. Patient-derived organoids that have been grown ex-vivo have shown to overlap almost completely with their parent organ in terms of genetic sequence and molecular makeup. Due to their high number of genetic similarities, patient-derived organoids have been shown to react the same way to certain drug treatments in a few studies, which allows researchers to provide combinations of different cancer drug treatments that are tailored to each individual patient, rather than using a standardized approach that only seems to work for some patients. Patient-derived organoids are still a rather new approach to cancer drug therapy testing, and they still present some limitations, such as their inability to grow as large and as highly vascularized as their parent organ. While these limitations may have the ability to hinder the effectiveness of patient-derived organoids, some organoids have shown success in colorectal cancer drug therapy trials, and their limitations are likely to be overcome as more information is known about patient-derived organoids. Organoids are a promising approach to the treatment of colorectal cancer and have the potential to help save more patients than previous approaches.