Researchers at McGill University are working on a new organ chip that will allow them to predict how cancer treatment will affect patients.
The new tech comes as doctors have found that not all cancer treatment works the same for everyone. Some patients who have advance cancer who are still eligible for surgery usually receive neoadjuvant chemotherapy to shrink the tumour and improve surgical outcomes, but some tumors are resistant to that treatment.
Due to this, McGill University has been working on a device called an organ-on-a-chip, which will allow doctors to recreate the patient’s cancer and surrounding tissues, allowing doctors to predict how the cancer will respond to treatment.
“This is the first time we have been able to reproduce, outside the body, not only a person’s cancer but also the surrounding support cells and proteins—in a way that predicts treatment response very precisely,” says Dr. Ferri, Director of the Division of Thoracic and Upper Gastrointestinal Surgery at the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) and Senior Scientist in the Cancer Research Program at The Institute.
“This innovation has the potential to directly improve patient outcomes by enabling clinicians to match each patient with the therapies best suited to them.”
The organ-on-a-chip has been developed using two existing technologies: organoids — tiny mini organs made up of clusters of cells grown from a patient’s tumour, which can mimic many characteristics of cancerous tissue — and microfluidic organs-on-chips.
“However, to determine how a cancer responds to treatment, these organoids lack important elements of the tumour’s microenvironment, such as stromal cells and the connective tissues surrounding the tumour,” explains Pal, Scientific Research Manager in Dr. Ferri’s team.
“To address these gaps and better capture the complexity of the tumour, we drew on the human organ-on-a-chip microfluidic culture technology developed at the Wyss Institute.”
In the study, researchers created organoids from biopsies from newly diagnosed patients who had not yet received treatment.
From there, they cultured cells from the organoids on a microfluidic chip and added a tissue from the tumor to recreate the tumor environment.
Researchers were then able to circulate chemotherapy drugs used in the clinic through the chip, which replicated the same concentrations and exposure times as in the actual treatment given to the patient.
Findings from the chip treatment accurately predicted the response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy in just 12 days in eight patients.
In four of the chips, the treatments caused cancer cell death, while in the other four, the cells survived. The results in the chips matched with the patients’ actual responses to the same chemotherapy, as well as with their survival rates following surgical removal of the tumour.
“The perfect match between chip results and patient outcomes suggests that the model could become a powerful tool to support decision-making in clinical practice,” adds Dr. Ferri, who is also the David S. Mulder Chair of Surgery at McGill University.
“Not only was the organ chip able to recreate the microscopic appearance and DNA of the patient’s tumour, but it also reproduced the response to chemotherapy more accurately than organoids had in previous studies.”
Researchers are hoping that the new tech will personalize treatments for patients, develop new targeted therapies for specific cancers, and find biomarkers to monitor and optimize the effects of drugs in patients. Additionally, they are hoping to launch a clinical trial within the next year.
“Being able to predict whether a chemotherapy regimen will work for a given patient could be transformative,” says Dr. Ferri. “Even more importantly, this innovation opens up exciting new possibilities for drug discovery and precision oncology — not only for gastrointestinal cancers, but for many other types of cancer as well.”
The study was recently published in the Journal of Translational Medicine.