US researchers said on Monday they have discovered how to keep tumour cells alive in the lab, generating buzz in the scientific community about a potential breakthrough that could transform cancer treatment.
Until now, scientists have been unable to make cancer cells thrive for very long in the laboratory in a condition that resembles the way they look and act in the body. Doctors have largely relied on biopsied tissue that is frozen or set in wax to diagnose and recommend treatment.
The advance has sparked new hope that someday doctors may be able to test a host of cancer-killing drugs on a person’s own tumour cells in the lab, before returning to the patient with a therapy that is likely to be a good match.
“This would really be the ultimate in personalised medicine,” said lead author Richard Schlegel, chairman of the department of pathology at Georgetown University’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Centre. “The therapies would be exactly from their tissues. We would get normal tissue and tumour tissue from a particular patient and specifically match up their therapies,” Schlegel said. “We are really excited about the possibilities of testing what we can do with this.” The method, described in the online edition of the American Journal of Pathology, borrows on a simple method used in stem cell research, experts said. Lung, breast, prostate and colon cancers were kept alive for up to two years using the technique, which combines fibroblast feeder cells to keep cells alive and a Rho kinase (ROCK) inhibitor that allows them to reproduce.
When treated with the duo, both cancer and normal cells reverted to a “stem-like state,” Schlegel said.
The two elements have previously been used separately in stem cell research, according to Yale University pathology professor David Rimm, who wrote a commentary that accompanies the article.