A study from a research group in Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center has reported, for the first time, the success in the long-term culture of prostate cancer from biopsy specimens and circulating tumor cells. This finding will provide an exciting new tool to test cancer drugs and individualized cancer approach. This result was published in Cell.
Prostate cancer is the most common malignancy and the second most common cause of cancer death in Western men. The American Cancer Society estimates that there will be 233,000 new cases of prostate cancer diagnosed in United States in 2014. However, the lack of in vitro prostate cancer models that recapitulate the diversity of human prostate cancer has hampered progress in understanding disease pathogenesis and therapy response.
In this research, scientists have successfully cultivated seven human-derived prostate cancer organoid lines derived from diverse disease sites including circulating tumor cells. These organoid lines are first fully characterized ones that recapitulate the molecular diversity of prostate cancer subtypes, including TMPRSS2-ERG fusion, SPOP mutation, SPINK1 overexpression, and CHD1 loss.
With these oragniod lines, the researchers have got the new source that could be used to control and capture the molecular diversity of prostate cancer. It will be a valuable tool to test the drug sensitivity. This methodology should enable the generation of a large repertoire of patient-derived prostate cancer lines amenable to genetic and pharmacologic studies.
Reference:
Gao, D., Vela, I., Sboner, A., Iaquinta, P. J., Karthaus, W. R., Gopalan, A., … & Chen, Y. (2014). Organoid Cultures Derived from Patients with Advanced Prostate Cancer. Cell.