A study sought to assess organoids and short-term ex vivo cultures of prostate cancer (PCa), which may facilitate drug testing in personalized medicine for the disease. The findings appeared in journal Klinicka Onkologie.
In this analysis, the researchers processed both cancer and normal tissues from 50 patients who underwent radical prostatectomy or transurethral resection. Moreover, they exploited the ex vivo tissue culture technique and conducted chemotherapy assays using gemcitabine and Chk1 inhibitor MU380 in 10 patient samples.
According to the results, the researchers were able to successfully cultivate organoids from 58% of tumors and 69% of normal tissue. They noted that the immunohistochemical staining of two representative cases revealed cell positivity for pan-cytokeratin confirming the presence of epithelial cells. The investigators said that: “However, the overexpression of AMACR and ERG proteins in tumors was not recapitulated in organoids.”
“We have established cultures of both organoids and tissue fragments from PCa patient samples. However, the expression of tumor markers was not recapitulated in organoids. Inconsistent morphology among tissue fragments and low proliferation hampered the interpretation of the drug testing in most cases,” the researchers concluded. “Still, these approaches may be promising using tissues from metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer.”
