2023-04-24 16:58:00
A Bern research team has grown artificial mini bladder tumors in the laboratory. Drugs can be specifically tested on these. According to the researchers, this could play an important role in the development of personalized therapies.
According to a statement by the Inselspital Bern on Monday, this is particularly important for bladder cancer.
This type of cancer varies greatly from patient to patient. Finding a treatment is therefore difficult. Each tumor responds differently to a particular treatment. Accordingly, the overall response rate to standard therapies in bladder cancer patients is less than 30 percent.
Scientists therefore place great hopes in personalized therapies that are individually tailored to the individual patient.
The researchers at the Inselspital – the University Hospital of Bern – and the University of Bern have taken a step in this direction. The scientists cultivated so-called tumor organoids from individual cancer cells from 41 patients with bladder cancer.
This is a kind of mini tumor that is very similar to its mother tumor, as the scientists showed in their publication in the renowned journal “Nature Communications”. The organoids responded to cancer drugs similarly to the tumors of origin in the patients taking the same drugs.
According to the scientists, the artificial tumors can help in the future to characterize a patient’s cancer more precisely and to individually test the response to a therapy in advance.
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