Organoids: A Revolutionary New Tool for Drug Screening

“The poor translatability of early-stage preclinical models is a major setback in oncology drug development. Immortalized cell lines, that are extensively used in drug screens, undergo genetic drift over time due to adapting to in vitro growth, thus showing limited relevance to the human disease. Interpatient tumor heterogeneity is also a major hurdle with standard in vitro models failing to recapitulate this variability. Patient-derived xenografts are the gold standard preclinical models for their proven translatability to the human disease but can be costly and time consuming to generate and maintain. The Hubrecht Organoid Technology (HUB) has pioneered the development of tumor organoids, a revolutionary patient-derived 3D in vitro system that recapitulates the genomic, morphological, and pathophysiological characteristics of their parental tumor. HUB organoids provide highly clinically relevant 3D in vitro models for oncology drug development. To overcome the limitation imposed by sourcing patient material for organoid preclinical development PDX can be used as a source of human tumor tissue leading to a patient-relevant matched in vitro/in vivo platform for oncology drug screening.”

Learning bullets:
1. Find out why HUB organoids are considered best in class systems
2. Understand how organoids are revolutionizing oncology drug development
3. Learn about how patient-derived xenografts (PDX) can be leveraged to develop the largest organoid library for oncology drug discovery