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The Lee Lab at Vanderbilt

Fine-Needle Aspiration-Based Patient-Derived Cancer Organoids

AUTHORS

Vilgelm AEAnne , Bergdorf KKensey , Wolf MMelissa , Bharti VVijaya , Shattuck-Brandt RRebecca , Blevins AAshlyn , Jones CCaroline , Phifer CCourtney , Lee MAMason , Lowe CCindy , Rachel HHongo , Boyd KKelli , James NNetterville , Rohde SSara , Idrees KKamran , Bauer JAJoshua , Westover DDavid , Reinfeld BBradley , Baregamian NNaira , Richmond AAnn , Rathmell KKimryn , Lee EEthan , McDonald OGOliver , Weiss VLVivian . iScience. 2020 8 21; 8(23).

ABSTRACT

Patient-derived cancer organoids hold great potential to accurately model and predict therapeutic responses. Efficient organoid isolation methods that mini- mize post-collection manipulation of tissues would improve adaptability, accu- racy, and applicability to both experimental and real-time clinical settings. Here we present a simple and minimally invasive fine-needle aspiration (FNA)-based or- ganoid culture technique using a variety of tumor types including gastrointes- tinal, thyroid, melanoma, and kidney. This method isolates organoids directly from patients at the bedside or from resected tissues, requiring minimal tissue processing while preserving the histologic growth patterns and infiltrating im- mune cells. Finally, we illustrate diverse downstream applications of this tech- nique including in vitro high-throughput chemotherapeutic screens, in situ im- mune cell characterization, and in vivo patient-derived xenografts. Thus, routine clinical FNA-based collection techniques represent an unappreciated sub- stantial source of material that can be exploited to generate tumor organoids from a variety of tumor types for both discovery and clinical applications.