Better understand the tumor to better attack it. Here is the idea of this clinical trial led by Fanny Jaulin, director of the team “Collective invasion” in the Inserm unit U1279 of the Gustave Roussy institute. To treat colorectal cancer, the team of researchers creates an organoid from the tumor. If the technique is already used in research, it is a first in digestive cancers.
“An organoid is a 3D copy of a patient’s tumor made from a sample. This miniature cancer avatar reproduces its peculiarities: biological characteristics, resistance to treatments, reflection of the therapeutic history of patients …“The goal? Find new therapeutic responses to colon cancer, which can be very well treated by surgery if it is detected early enough but which becomes difficult to handle once it has metastasized.
The researcher explains that digestive cancers “have not really benefited from the two recent therapeutic revolutions in oncology: immunotherapy and precision medicine. Some patients very quickly find themselves in a therapeutic impasse that is difficult to accept because they are often still able to receive other treatments.“.
A tailor-made chemogram
Patients can be included in the study when they reach the last line of standard treatment. From there, organoids from their tumors will be made and 26 conventional chemotherapy or targeted chemotherapy drugs will be tested on tumor avatars. This will allow a tailor-made chemogram to be established between three and six weeks after the tumor biopsy.
Better understanding how the tumor works and what it reacts to will open up treatment options for patients. The goal is then to be able to expand these tests on 39 molecules for more therapeutic options, and to “pair the chemogram with exhaustive tumor molecular sequencing in order to understand which genetic abnormalities are possibly associated with the response to treatments“specifies Fanny Jaulin.
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