Head and neck cancer is an aggressive type of cancer that requires harsh treatments that often have side effects. In a study published yesterday in Cancer Discovery, researchers of the Hubrecht Institute and UMC Utrecht succeeded in growing organoids of head and neck cancers that can be kept alive in a petri dish.
“These mini-tumors can be used to better understand this complex disease,” says first author Else Driehuis. “Moreover, organoids allow us to test both novel and existing therapies in the lab without burdening the patient.”
The researchers have now shown that organoids can be grown from head and neck squamous cell carcinomas (HNSCC). These mini-organs are derived from patient material—for example, from the tumor mass removed during surgery. After growing the mini-tumors, the researchers exposed them to radio- and chemotherapies that are currently given to patients with head and neck cancer. Upon exposure to these therapies, the organoids behaved in the same way as the tumors in the patients they were derived from.
“We have now started a study in which we will include more patients to see if organoids can indeed predict the patient’s response to therapy,” Driehuis says. “At the moment, many patients are exposed to harsh chemotherapeutics, whereas some of them, in hindsight, did not benefit from this therapy. In the lab, we can test many different drugs at the same time to see how the tumor-organoids of the patient respond to them. Potentially, such tests can help us to choose the right therapy for each individual patient.”
The researchers also exposed the mini-tumors to a range of targeted therapies. These drugs cause less severe side effects than conventional chemotherapies, but they only work for a subset of patients.
“For some of these drugs, it has proven difficult to predict which patients will benefit from the treatment. Unfortunately, this has limited the success of these promising therapies so far,” Driehuis explains. “In our study, we observed that each of the drugs we tested was effective in the organoids of at least one patient. More research will tell us if the tumor-organoids can also predict the patient response for these therapies.”
Image: Organoids cultured from tumor and healthy tissue of a patient with head and neck cancer. Both the original tissue and the organoids are stained with hematoxylin (purple) and eosin (pink), a standard stain used in diagnostics. Tumor organoids look different than organoids cultured from healthy tissue and additionally retain characteristics of the original tumor tissue. Image courtesy of Else Driehuis, © Hubrecht Institute.