Tumor organoids facilitate the search for personalized therapies.
Scientists from the Idibapbs research institute at Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, led by Patricia Pérez-Galán, are developing prototype lymphoma chips to investigate personalized therapies against this disease. These new organoids, or prototype tumors, are generated in the laboratory from cells from the patient’s tumor, embedded in a matrix that mimics the physical properties of a lymph node affected by lymphoma. “The lymphoma chip is a very good tool for testing immunotherapies outside the patient, more cheaply and quickly than in animal models, so it would also help reduce the use of experimental animals in biomedicine,” Pérez-Galán declares.
A fundamental point of this new system is that it allows each case to be evaluated individually. “Non-Hodgkin lymphoma is the most frequent of the hematological tumors, but it has enormous genetic heterogeneity. Only culturing lymphoma cells from the patient is not enough to reproduce the microenvironment or niche in which the tumor develops. It is necessary to introduce other non-tumor cell types present in the lymph nodes, and complement them with blood and lymphatic vessels”, explains the researcher.
Together with his team and scientists from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Pérez-Galán has bridged that distance by developing a vascularized chip on which to build, with lymphoma cells from the patient, a personalized organoid to test different treatments and find the most effective one.
“These new chips will help to investigate more precisely how each therapy reaches the tumor. Also to identify the cells involved in the immune response triggered by immunotherapies. Study these processes closely
it is one of the great challenges for these treatments to be effective”, concludes the researcher. Isabel Troytino