Personalized in vitro model enables drug screening for kidney cancer
One way to treat the most common type of kidney cancer is to use anti-angiogenic drugs to cut off the blood supply to the tumors, but patients respond differently to the drugs, and choosing the wrong one can make the cancer grow faster.
A new UW Carbone Cancer Center study, published online this week in EBioMedicine, has developed a model that mimics the tumor’s blood supply on a three-dimensional platform designed in the laboratory of Dr. David Beebe, professor of biomedical engineering and pathology and a Biotechnology Training Program (BTP) mentor. The authors of the study, led by Drs. Jose “Tony” Jimenez-Torres and Maria Virumbrales-Munoz, used both normal and cancerous tissue from patients to grow the blood vessels. They replicated many of the structures seen in the normal and cancer-tissue blood supplies and used them to test targeted drugs used to treat renal cell carcinoma.
Renal cell carcinoma is the third most common genitourinary cancer in the United States, with about 64,000 new cases each year. This kidney cancer tends not to respond to standard chemotherapy, so anti-angiogenic targeted agents, which can cut off the blood supply to tumors by inhibiting vessel formation, are often used.
Tumor and normal tissue are removed from the patient during surgery, the cells are isolated, and then injected into the lumen device created by the Beebe lab. There they grew into three-dimensional models of kidney cancer blood vessels.
Photos of the in-vitro vasculature show vessels on the left before treatment. The vessel in the top photo was untreated and was sprouting after 48 hours. The vessel on the bottom received sunitinib, and 48 hours later shows few or no sprouts. The graph shows patient models that did respond to the drug (those below 0 on the graph) and those (above 0) that did not.