p-care partner Giannino Del Sal and his team at the University of Trieste, Italy, have developed a collection of patient-derived organoids (PDOs) from invasive breast carcinomas and completed their characterization. The work has been described in the research article published today in the international journal Cancers (Basel).

p-care scientists and collaborators demonstrated that PDOs displayed different features of the parental tumors and can be used in preclinical experiments to model different types of breast cancer, test therapeutic strategies and unveil therapy-resistant groups of cells.

The researchers are now working on further developing the methodology, improving the conditions for the co-culture of tumor cells and other cell components that are present in the tissue of origin, and engineering matrices that can mimic a crucial aspect of the tumor environment, its physical properties.

This study started within the PreCanMed project, in which Del Sal’s team was involved, and the researchers were able to conclude it thanks to p-care.

E. Campaner, A. Zannini, M. Santorsola, D. Bonazza, C. Bottin, V. Cancila, C. Tripodo, M. Bortul, F. Zanconati, S. Schoeftner, and G. Del Sal. Breast Cancer Organoids Model Patient-Specific Response to Drug Treatment. Cancers (Basel) 2020, 12(12), 3869; https://doi.org/10.3390/cancers12123869