Tissue grown from biopsies shown to closely mimic patients’ tumours, allowing researchers to study specific mutations and identify most promising drugs. Scientists have created the world’s first “Living Biobank” of patients’ tumours and used the tissue to identify the most promising drugs for each person’s disease. Tiny biopsies of the patients’ tumours were grown into clumps of cells and kept alive in the lab, so researchers could study their specific mutations and subject the tumours to more than 80 anti-cancer drugs.
Geneticists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge said the work marked a step towards more personalised medical treatments that target cancer tumour by tumour in individual patients. The researchers grew what they call 3D Organoids from both cancerous and healthy tissue biopsies taken from 20 patients with bowel cancer. All of the patients had received…
