So far, it has not been possible to predict the efficacy of chemotherapy in metastatic colorectal cancer. In the case that chemotherapy is no longer effective, this leads to unnecessary burdens due to severe side effects. However, if the right chemotherapy is found in an early stage, the life of seriously ill people can be prolonged by months or even years.

Researchers from the Netherlands Cancer Institute, Dept. Molecular Oncology & Immunology, in Amsterdam, led by Prof. Dr. Emile Voest, have now succeeded in predicting the correct chemotherapy with the help of the patient's own cancer cells. For their work, they cultivated tumour cells in organoid form from 61 patients with metastatic colorectal cancer and treated the cells with the cytostatic agent irinotecan or with combination therapy of 5-fluorouracil (FU)/irinotecan respectively 5-FU/Oxaliplatin.

In their investigation, they succeeded in predicting successful treatment with irinotecan in more than 80% of all cases. Only 20% of the treatments with this cytostatic agent showed remission. However, they could not predict 5-fluorouracil plus oxaliplatin. Additionally, for combination therapy of 5-fluorouracil (FU)/irinotecan their prediction with the in vitro organoid model was not very reliable.

The scientists concluded that the in vitro model could be used to exclude unhelpful cytostatic therapies that only cause side effects in patients.

The team has published their research in Journal Translational Medicine.
Salo N. Ooft, Fleur Weeber, Krijn K. Dijkstra et al. (2019). Patient-derived organoids can predict response to chemotherapy in metastatic colorectal cancer patients. Sci. transl. Med. 11, eaay2574 (2019) 9 October 2019.

Source:
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