Causing about 10 million deaths a year, cancer is one of the biggest enemies of the human race. A major challenge in cancer treatment is that, due to the diversity in cancer and in patients, the responses to a certain drug are often unpredictable. Consequently, many patients go through ineffective treatment with high costs and toxic side effects. Personalized cancer treatment often requires genomic biomarkers: this is infeasible for most patients and for most drugs. A company in China, Accurate International, offers individualized drug sensitivity test based on patient-derived organoid. A cancer organoid is a miniaturized and simplified version of a tumor outside human body that can be made from a patient’s tumor. Such organoids have realistic 3-D micro-anatomy with phenotypic and genotypic profiles highly similar to the original tumor. These organoids have long-term stability and allow high-throughput drug screening.
Specifically, the service starts with collecting patient tumor cells from surgical samples, needle biopsy samples, endoscopic biopsy samples, or malignant effusions. Then the tumor cells are washed and isolated into single cells. These single cells grow into organoids in matrigel. Various cancer drugs are then tested on these cancer organoids. The drug testing results are analyzed and reported to doctors. On average, the whole procedure takes about 14 days. With this service, patients are much more likely to be treated with drugs that actually benefit them, thereby dramatically increasing treatment effectiveness.
Link: Website
Contact: CXGJ@3dbudcare.cn
Location: China
Purpose
Provide cancer drugs that actually work for a patient
Idea
Develop patient-derived cancer organoids in vitro that allow drug testing
Further Possibilities
1. Customize the treatment of other diseases with organoids
2. Use neuroscience (EEG) to model human preferences
3. Build models of physical objects in VR to test their popularity
4. Build VR models of a customer to try on clothes
5. Build brain organoids to study intelligence or AI
Questions
1. What might be all the ways to model human responses to products or services?
2. What other problems do organoids solve?
3. How might we customize cancer treatment without organoids?
