Derivation and study of organoids from cancer patients
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Derivation and study of organoids from cancer patients - Towards the next-generation of cancer cell line models
IRAS ID
203519
Contact name
Mathew Garnett
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
Duration of Study in the UK
6 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
Approximately 1,000 human cancer cell lines (cells taken from a human cancer and grown in the laboratory indefinitely) are available to scientists worldwide and this has been a useful resource for cancer research. Over the past decade the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (WTSI) has played a central role in the charcterisation of a large number of human cancer cell lines through the 'Catalogue of Somatic Mutations in Cancer' (COSMIC) cell line project http://cancer.sanger.ac.uk/cosmic and Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer (GDSC) project http://www.cancerrxgene.org/ allowing us to identify biomarkers of drug response.
However as we enter the era of precision medicine, the inadequacies of our traditional cancer cell lines which include, poor representation of some cancer types, insufficient numbers to capture the genetic diversity of cancer, lack of clinical outcome data and lack of comparison to a normal reference sample, limit their use. Novel cell line derivation methods such as organoid derivation (a 3D cell line generated from human tissue samples) have revolutionised our ability to derive cell line models from both healthy and diseased tissue, and have the potential to overcome the above limitations. Using surplus tissue samples from patients already undergoing biopsies or surgical resections we intend to create thousands of new human cancer cell lines/organoid models from multiple tumour types as an experimental tool and make these available to the research community.
These cancer cell lines will be genetically characterised (the order of DNA bases in the genetic code), and compared with the changes observed in the donated tissue to determine how well these new cell lines capture the genetics of the donating tumour. We will perform drug screens in the hope of identifying novel cancer treatments and, by amalgamating this data with the genetic information, we also hope to identify biomarkers of drug response, working towards personalised cancer treatment.
REC name
London - Camden & Kings Cross Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
16/LO/1110
Date of REC Opinion
13 Jun 2016
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion