ASO Author Reflections: We Can Stomach It: Personalizing Medicine with EGD-Derived Gastric Cancer Organoids

Excerpt

Gastric adenocarcinoma is a leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide, and advances in therapies have been relatively slow. Additionally, considerable time and cost constraints are associated with the introduction of new drugs into the clinic, limiting the availability of treatment options for patients.1 This process can be expedited by increasing the availability of accurate and less costly tools to screen large numbers of potential therapies. During the past decades, the gold standard in vitro human cancer model used for drug sensitivity-testing was cancer cell lines, which are typically derived from a single patient and immortalized.2 This model is grown in monolayer and cultured in growth-promoting media for many generations, which is unrepresentative of the in vivo tumor microenvironment.2 As such, cancer cell lines do not accurately represent the tumor of origin.2 …