Application and progress of organoids in tumor translational medicine

Abstract

With the introduction of precision medicine, the individualized treatment of cancer has raised increasing interest in the field. Recently, the utilization of organoids as a powerful tool for precision medicine has achieved great breakthroughs for basic research and potential clinical usage. Organoids usually derived from stem/progenitor cells are organ-specific multi-cell clusters organized in a manner like the cell differentiation patterns of their original in vivo counterpart. While keeping the basic pathological/genetic/biological phenotypes of their parental primary cells/tissues, tumor organoids still have a certain potential for proliferative immortalization, which makes organoid-based research/clinical models hopeful tools for precision medicine, especially in predicting drug sensitivity for clinical patients or conducting high-throughput screening of new compounds/drugs for pharmaceutical development. However, obstacles still exist to the clinical application of organoid-based tools, such as the lack of in vivo tumor microenvironment. Currently, with the development of co-culture, microfluidic and bioprinting techniques, breakthroughs have been made for the practical clinical/industrial utilization of organoids. In the current review, we compared the characteristics of common ex vivo tumor models with organoid-based models, summarized the protocols for tumor organoid culturing, reviewed the clinical/industrial application of tumor organoids, and finally look forward to the new outlooks of tumor organoid-based tools in the future.

Keywords

• |tumor|organoid|translational medicine|drug susceptibility prediction|drug screening