In the lab of Hongjun Song, PhD, and Guo-li Ming, MD, PhD, something like a clinical trial is underway, except that no human patients are involved.
Instead, hundreds of "mini brain tumors" immersed in cocktails of culture media and chemotherapies are the study subjects. "We call these avatars for testing cancer treatment," Song said.
These micro-sized organoids-three-dimensional cultures of brain cells-contain cells from surgical tumor samples of patients at Penn Medicine's Abramson Cancer Center with recurrent glioblastoma, a type of aggressive brain tumor that returns after treatment.
In a recent paper, Song, Ming, and other collaborators at Penn showed that the organoids they developed could serve as a real-time mimic of patients' brain tumors. In other words, if the treatment works in the organoid, it works in the human patient as well. "The assumption here is that only certain treatments can work on certain patients," Song said. "The key is to find a match."
