Abstract:

With the introduction of precision medicine, the individualized treatment of cancer has raised increasing interest in the field. Recently, the utilization of organoids as a powerful tool for precision medicine has achieved great breakthroughs for basic research and potential clinical usage. Organoids usually derived from stem/progenitor cells are organ-specific multi-cell clusters organized in a manner like the cell differentiation patterns of their original in vivo counterpart. While keeping the basic pathological/genetic/biological phenotypes of their parental primary cells/tissues, tumor organoids still have a certain potential for proliferative immortalization, which makes organoid-based research/clinical models hopeful tools for precision medicine, especially in predicting drug sensitivity for clinical patients or conducting high-throughput screening of new compounds/drugs for pharmaceutical development. However, obstacles still exist to the clinical application of organoid-based tools, such as the lack of in vivo tumor microenvironment. Currently, with the development of co-culture, microfluidic and bioprinting techniques, breakthroughs have been made for the practical clinical/industrial utilization of organoids. In the current review, we compared the characteristics of common ex vivo tumor models with organoid-based models, summarized the protocols for tumor organoid culturing, reviewed the clinical/industrial application of tumor organoids, and finally look forward to the new outlooks of tumor organoid-based tools in the future.

Key words: Tumor, Organoid, Translational medicine, Drug susceptibility prediction, Drug screening