News Release

Primary pancreatic organoid tumor models for high-throughput phenotypic drug screening

Peer-Reviewed Publication

SLAS (Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening)

PANC-1 Spheroid

image: A Z-stack image was obtained after staining nuclei with Hoechst using confocal microscopy at 5 micron intervals and then assembled using ImageJ software. view more 

Credit: Shurong Hou, Ph.D.

A multidisciplinary team of scientists share recent advancements in innovative in-vitro cancer biology methods for screening drug-like molecules in cancer tissue relevant models in a new report published online ahead-of-print at SLAS Discovery. Entitled "Advanced Development of Primary Pancreatic Organoid Tumor Models for High-Throughput Phenotypic Drug Screening," the report can be accessed for free.

The authors -- Senior Scientific Directors Timothy Spicer and Louis Scampavia and Post-Doctoral Associate Shurong Hou at Scripps Florida in collaboration with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Greiner Bio-One, Nano3D Biosciences, Inc., University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute -- illustrate how a magnetic nanoparticle assembly approach is used to increase throughput dramatically while reducing costs. This technology combines specialized high-density microtiter plates formulated with an ultra-low attachment surface along with gold nanoparticles (nanoshuttles), which are used to label cancer cells in-vitro. Once labeled, a magnetic driver quickly pulls the cells into a 3D spheroid or organoid structure. This 3D structure is retained and drug-like molecules can then be added, affording the ability to ascertain their efficacy.

With the advent of cost-effective and high-throughput 3D tissue culture, the importance of developing this technology using patient-derived cancer cells is to ensure a more disease and physiologically relevant point of comparison to 2D monolayer testing, thereby validating the hypothesis of 3D relevance as a predictor of possible patient outcomes. This allows researchers to step closer to identifying patient-specific therapies and points in the direction of rapid 3D testing of patient-derived cancer cells against FDA-approved drugs, which may be both affordable and amenable for a precision medicine approach to provide timely and critical feedback to physicians.

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Advanced Development of Primary Pancreatic Organoid Tumor Models for High-Throughput Phenotypic Drug Screening can be accessed for free at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177%2F2472555218766842. For more information about SLAS and its journals, visit http://www.slas.org/journals.

A PDF of this article is available to credentialed media outlets upon request. Contact nhallock@slas.org.

About our Society and Journals

SLAS (Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening) is an international community of nearly 20,000 professionals and students dedicated to life sciences discovery and technology. The SLAS mission is to bring together researchers in academia, industry and government to advance life sciences discovery and technology via education, knowledge exchange and global community building.

SLAS DISCOVERY: 2016 Impact Factor 2.444. Editor-in-Chief Robert M. Campbell, Ph.D., Eli Lilly and Company, Indianapolis, IN (USA). SLAS Discovery (Advancing Life Sciences R&D) was previously published (1996-2016) as the Journal of Biomolecular Screening (JBS).

SLAS TECHNOLOGY: 2016 Impact Factor 2.850. Editor-in-Chief Edward Kai-Hua Chow, Ph.D., National University of Singapore (Singapore). SLAS Technology (Translating Life Sciences Innovation) was previously published (1996-2016) as the Journal of Laboratory Automation (JALA).

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