Development of Enhanced-Performance Mini Organ "Organoid"
Improved accuracy in predicting drug efficacy for pancreatic cancer patients
A research team at Severance Hospital has succeeded in developing a mini organ "organoid" with enhanced performance. With these improvements, it is expected that drug efficacy can be predicted with greater accuracy.
Professor Seungmin Bang and Professor Garam Lim, Department of Gastroenterology, Severance Hospital. Severance Hospital
On June 11, Professor Seungmin Bang and Professor Garam Lim from the Department of Gastroenterology at Severance Hospital, along with Assistant Professor Jinsu Kim from the Department of Internal Medicine at Yonsei University College of Medicine, announced that they have successfully created an organoid using cells from pancreatic cancer patients. This organoid maintains the genetic characteristics of the actual patient and demonstrates similar effects to anticancer drug administration. The results of this study were published in the latest issue of "Molecular Cancer" (Impact Factor 27.7), a leading international journal in cancer research.
Despite advances in various diagnostic and therapeutic technologies, pancreatic cancer remains one of the deadliest cancers, with a five-year survival rate of only 10%. Most patients are diagnosed at an advanced stage when surgery is no longer an option, leaving them reliant on chemotherapy. However, there are currently no biomarkers available to predict treatment efficacy, so the selection of anticancer drugs depends solely on the patient's condition or the experience of the medical staff.
Although there have been previous attempts to establish pancreatic cancer organoid models to predict patient treatment responses and test new drugs, these models have limitations. The original characteristics of the organoids tend to deteriorate when exposed to growth factors for extended periods during the cultivation process, resulting in reduced accuracy of prediction outcomes.
The research team successfully developed a three-dimensional organoid model that accurately reflects the genetic characteristics of actual patients, using pancreatic cancer cell lines derived from patients and accumulated over the past 10 years. When the same combination of anticancer drugs prescribed to patients was applied to this newly developed organoid model, the prediction outcomes closely matched the actual treatment results.
In particular, the team developed a platform that allows organoids to be stably maintained without the inclusion of growth factors, unlike previous methods. This enables the organoids to retain their original characteristics even during long-term cultivation, thereby increasing the reliability of predictions. As a result, this development is expected to provide practical benefits not only for personalized treatment for individual patients but also in the design of clinical studies and the process of new drug development.
Professor Seungmin Bang stated, "By developing a model that can accurately predict individual patients' responses to treatment in advance, we now have the possibility of providing the optimal anticancer drug in a personalized manner."
Professor Garam Lim added, "Through this study, we expect to increase the success rate of clinical trials and dramatically reduce the costs and time required in the process of new drug development."
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