Growing organoids in dishes and xenografts in mice lets scientists re-create a living person’s tumor—and test dozens of drugs against them at the same time.
areThe Welms’ approach, called, posits that you can find answers by growing organoids and xenografts as tools for trial-and-error drug testing. Both are like “avatars,” says Elgene Lim, a medical oncologist with the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia. “Having the confidence that your avatar is truly anavatar could potentially cut down the billions of dollars spent on drug development barking up the wrong tree only because your model is wrong.
Next, to prove that their models actually represented a patient’s cancer, they compared the organoids and the xenografts to each other and to the real tumor: Were the same genes active? Did they grow as quickly? Did they respond the same way to drugs? Yes, yes, and yes. The team felt confident that they had built high-fidelity avatars. “Now,” asks Welm, “can we actually use it to help?”
This is often true for the extremely aggressive cancers Welm studies. But she is encouraged by two key oncological metrics from this patient’s treatment: “progression-free survival” and “time to next systemic therapy” . Both numbers usually go down with each subsequent round of treatment. In this case, they went up. The patient’s previous chemotherapy had stopped the cancer from growing for 41 days.
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