‘Excitement’ over potential for testing cancer drugs on lab-grown tumours at Auckland Uni

Source: Radio New Zealand

A project at the cutting edge of cancer research hopes to build a collection of tiny lab-grown tumours at the University of Auckland.

Smaller than a grain of sand, these so-called tumour organoids can be used to test experimental cancer treatments with quick results.

With samples taken from patients, Dr Hossein Jahedi is building a collection of these tiny, fleshy lumps of cancer.

“We take a tiny bit of their tumour, with their permission, and we take it into the lab. We digest it into single cells, so we kind of digest all the stuff around the cancer cells so that we only have the cancer cells, and then we grow these cancer cells in a jelly-like material,” he said.

The organoids themselves were barely the size of a grain of sand, but Dr Jahedi said their potential was enormous.

“They act like avatars for the cancers that we can grow in the lab. We can have a replica of that person’s cancer, not a 100 percent replica, but quite, quite similar,” he said.

“And what this does, it allows us to test some of the drugs that the patient may receive before they actually receive it to see if these organoids respond to those drugs.”

Jahedi’s new project, which focused on lung cancer, was inspired by his colleague, Dr Emma Nolan.

Nolan had been developing a library of breast cancer organoids since 2022 as part of a pilot study to prove how useful they could be.

To date, she had created organoids from 30 breast cancer patients, with a goal to build a library that researchers across the country could pull from to test life-saving treatments.

“So the idea with this organoid collection from these 30 patients, and we’re hoping to increase this, is that this becomes a tool for cancer research across New Zealand,” she said.

“And therefore, breast cancer labs across the country can use these models to answer their questions that they’re looking at.”

Cancer patients ‘put themselves as lab rats’

Cancer survivor David Downs knew firsthand how experimental treatments could save lives, but he said the process of undergoing new treatments was daunting.

“The pathway to medicines coming to the mainstream today does require humans to put themselves kind of as lab rats,” he said.

“You’re literally signing pieces of paper acknowledging that you’re one of the first humans to get this and they know roughly what the side effects might be but they’re not sure, etcetera. All that can create a bit of anxiety.”

Diagnosed in 2017 with a rare blood cancer that wouldn’t respond to chemotherapy, Downs braved a clinical trial in the United States that ultimately saved his life.

He hoped organoids could be used to improve that process and spare others the anxiety he felt.

“I went to Boston, I had a treatment, I was very lucky, it went really well for me. But you do certainly hear of side effects in some clinical trials, particularly early on, and so testing things in a way that involves human cells but isn’t involving humans, to me, feels like a really great breakthrough,” he said.

However, research into tumour organoids was still in the very early stages.

Even after three years of work, Dr Nolan said a clinical trial was years away.

“We would hope within the next five years to be able to initiate a small trial at one or two sites within Auckland in order to really test the clinical value of these organoids,” she said.

“There’s a lot of excitement in the group for this research and there’s a lot of potential but we really need to be able to confirm this in clinical trial before we’re able to know whether or not this actually ultimately could help.”

Dr Nolan said it would be some time before patients saw the benefits of the work, but the early results were promising.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand