Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence (LPBI) Group

organoids, which I know you’re pretty involved in with Hans Clevers. What are your plans for organoids of pancreatic cancer?

Organoids are a really terrific model of a patient’s tumour that you generate from tissue that is either removed at the time of surgery or when they get a small needle biopsy. Culturing the tissue and observing an outgrowth of it is usually successful and when you have the cells, you can perform molecular diagnostics of any type. With a patient-derived organoid, you can sequence the exome and the RNA, and you can perform drug testing, which I call ‘pharmacotyping’, where you’re evaluating compounds that by themselves or in combination show potency against the cells. A major goal of our lab is to work towards being able to use organoids to choose therapies that will work for an individual patient – personalized medicine.

Organoids could be made moot by implantable microdevices for drug delivery into tumors, developed by Bob Langer. These devices are the size of a pencil lead and contain reservoirs that release microdoses of different drugs; the device can be injected into the tumor to deliver drugs, and can then be carefully dissected out and analyzed to gain insight into the sensitivity of cancer cells to different anticancer agents. Bob and I are kind of engaged in a friendly contest to see whether organoids or microdosing devices are going to come out on top. I suspect that both approaches will be important for pharmacotyping cancer patients in the future.

From the science side, we use organoids to discover things about pancreatic cancer. They’re great models, probably the best that I know of to rapidly discover new things about cancer because you can grow normal tissue as well as malignant tissue. So, from the same patient you can do a comparison easily to find out what’s different in the tumor. Organoids are crazy interesting, and when I see other people in the pancreatic cancer field I tell them, you should stop what you’re doing and work on these because it’s the faster way of studying this disease.