Next-generation tumor organoids to recapitulate complex biological systems for screening applications

There is increasing interest in leveraging patient-derived tumor organoids for high-throughput drug screenings aimed at investigating tumor biology as well as identifying personalized medicine solutions. Tumor organoids recapitulate many features of the cancer they are derived from and are considered accurate preclinical models to rapidly mirror a patient’s drug response.

We have developed a fully optimized high-throughput screening approach to test the response of tumor organoids to hundreds of therapeutic agents, with results available within a week from surgery (Phan et al, 2019; Nguyen and Soragni, 2020; Al Shihabi et al, 2021).

Here we show how our platform can be effectively used to investigate drug susceptibilities, tumor heterogeneity and evolution in rare cancers and sarcomas in particular. In addition, we will discuss bioprinting implementations for automated organoid seeding and multi-organ co-culture models that further expand the applicability of the pipeline.