SOTO: treatment Sensitivity of Organoids to predict Treatment Outcome

  • Research type

    Research Study

  • Full title

    Prospective study to correlate the treatment Sensitivity of patient-derived Organoids with Treatment Outcomes in head and neck cancer patients

  • IRAS ID

    305689

  • Contact name

    Anthony Kong

  • Contact email

    anthony.kong@kcl.ac.uk

  • Sponsor organisation

    Kings College London

  • Duration of Study in the UK

    0 years, 11 months, 30 days

  • Research summary

    Up to 50% of the locally advanced head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) relapse within 3 to 5 years after definitive treatment which includes a combination of surgery and/or radiotherapy with or without concurrent platinum chemotherapy. There is currently no reliable biomarker to predict who would relapse after definitive treatment and what effective treatments should be given at recurrence.

    Tumour organoids are mini three-dimensional tumours derived from patients’ tumours and recent data has suggested that the use of patient-derived organoids (PDOs) in conjunction with genomic analysis from patient-derived tumour samples could be used to stratify and identify effective cancer therapies for individual patients.

    We have previously successfully generated PDOs from breast tumours to study the effect of different drugs. However, we haven’t started generating PDOs from head and neck cancers. In addition, using PDOs to inform clinical decision and to guide patients’ treatment is still a novel and relatively untried approach, and certainly not in head and neck cancers.

    This proposed observation study is required to establish the pathways and to assess the rate of PDOs successfully generated from head and neck tumours. We will compare the response of individual successfully generated PDOs to radiotherapy and chemotherapy to the responses/clinical outcomes of actual patients. In addition, we will test the ability of using PDOs in the routine care of patients to predict treatment response and long-term outcomes. In addition, the time required to generate HNSCC organoids and to assess treatment response in order to correlate with patients’ outcome will be evaluated.

    This project will help to develop a novel, untried approach to addressing unanswered questions, i.e. how to predict who will relapse and will need escalation of treatment. If we know for certain that the tumours are radio-resistant or platinum-resistant, it will change the way we treat these patients, e.g. increasing the radiotherapy dose for the residual tumour. For recurrent or metastatic HNSCC patients, PDOs may help to select future therapies.

  • REC name

    North West - Greater Manchester South Research Ethics Committee

  • REC reference

    22/NW/0023

  • Date of REC Opinion

    22 Mar 2022

  • REC opinion

    Further Information Favourable Opinion