Piro Geny, Agostini Antonio, Larghi Alberto, Quero Giuseppe, Carbone Carmine, Esposito Annachiara, Rizzatti Gianenrico, Attili Fabia, Alfieri Sergio, Costamagna Guido, Tortora Giampaolo
Department of Medical and Surgical Sciences, Medical Oncology, Fondazione Policlinico Universitario Agostino Gemelli IRCCS, Roma, Italy.
Digestive Endoscopy Unit, Fondazione Policlinico Universitario A. Gemelli IRCCS, Rome, Italy.
Front Med (Lausanne). 2021 Dec 23;8:793144. doi: 10.3389/fmed.2021.793144. eCollection 2021.
For many years, cell lines and animal models have been essential to improve our understanding of the basis of cell metabolism, signaling, and genetics. They also provided an essential boost to cancer drug discovery. Nevertheless, these model systems failed to reproduce the tumor heterogeneity and the complex biological interactions between cancer cells and human hosts, making a high priority search for alternative methods that are able to export results from model systems to humans, which has become a major bottleneck in the drug development. The emergent human 3D cell culture technologies have attracted widespread attention because they seem to have the potential to overcome these limitations. Organoids are unique 3D culture models with the ability to self-organize in contained structures. Their versatility has offered an exceptional window of opportunity to approach human cancers. Pancreatic cancers (PCs) patient-derived-organoids (PDOs) preserve histological, genomic, and molecular features of neoplasms they originate from and therefore retain their heterogeneity. Patient-derived organoids can be established with a high success rate from minimal tissue core specimens acquired with endoscopic-ultrasound-guided techniques and assembled into platforms, representing tens to hundreds of cancers each conserving specific features, expanding the types of patient samples that can be propagated and analyzed in the laboratory. Because of their nature, PDO platforms are multipurpose systems that can be easily adapted in co-culture settings to perform a wide spectrum of studies, ranging from drug discovery to immune response evaluation to tumor-stroma interaction. This possibility to increase the complexity of organoids creating a hybrid culture with non-epithelial cells increases the interest in organoid-based platforms giving a pragmatic way to deeply study biological interactions . In this view, implementing organoid models in co-clinical trials to compare drug responses may represent the next step toward even more personalized medicine. In the present review, we discuss how PDO platforms are shaping modern-day oncology aiding to unravel the most complex aspects of PC.
多年来,细胞系和动物模型对于增进我们对细胞代谢、信号传导及遗传学基础的理解至关重要。它们也为癌症药物研发提供了重要助力。然而,这些模型系统无法再现肿瘤异质性以及癌细胞与人类宿主之间复杂的生物相互作用,因此迫切需要寻找能够将模型系统的研究结果外推至人类的替代方法,这已成为药物研发的一个主要瓶颈。新兴的人类3D细胞培养技术因其似乎有潜力克服这些局限性而备受关注。类器官是独特的3D培养模型,能够在受限结构中自组织。它们的多功能性为研究人类癌症提供了绝佳契机。胰腺癌(PC)患者来源的类器官(PDO)保留了其起源肿瘤的组织学、基因组和分子特征,因而保留了其异质性。通过内镜超声引导技术获取的少量组织核心标本能够以很高的成功率建立患者来源的类器官,并组装成平台,每个平台代表数十至数百种保留特定特征的癌症,从而扩大了可在实验室中培养和分析的患者样本类型。由于其特性,PDO平台是多用途系统,可轻松应用于共培养环境,以开展广泛的研究,从药物研发到免疫反应评估再到肿瘤-基质相互作用研究。通过与非上皮细胞创建混合培养来增加类器官复杂性的这种可能性,提高了人们对基于类器官的平台的兴趣,为深入研究生物相互作用提供了一种切实可行的方法。从这个角度来看,在联合临床试验中应用类器官模型来比较药物反应可能代表着迈向更个性化医疗的下一步。在本综述中,我们讨论了PDO平台如何塑造现代肿瘤学,助力揭示PC最复杂的方面。