Using Cells for Meningioma Patients 'Organoid', Developed for the First Time in Korea
Jul 14, 2024
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Meningioma is the most common disease among brain tumors, and refers to all tumors that occur in the meninges surrounding the brain. Most are positive and treated surgically. However, there were no drugs other than radiation that could be used in case of recurrence after surgery, and this study is expected to be an important starting point for the development of new treatments.
Professor Ansdevan (co-corresponding author) of neurosurgery at Seoul St. Mary's Hospital of Catholic University, Professor Jeong Yeon-jun (co-corresponding author) of the Center for Precision Medicine at Catholic University of Medicine, Professor Kim Do-kyung (co-author), and Professor Junsung Park (co-author) of the Cancer Evolution Research Center created an organoid model using the cells of four meningioma patients. It is a patient-derived meningioma organoid that preserves various cell types representing the tumor microenvironment.
The results confirmed that it maintains its function and morphology after long-term culture and repeated cryopreservation-recovery cycles for more than 9 weeks, and maintains its original histological features and tumor microenvironment. The similarity between tumors of surgically removed patients was confirmed by immunohistochemistry (IHC) and full-length exome sequencing.
Subsequently, drug screening studies confirmed that mifepristone, which has been used in many studies to prevent the progression of brain tumors, has distinct anti-tumor effects in terms of survival, invasiveness, and protein expression.
Organoids are tissue and organoid analogs made by culturing or recombining stem cells in three dimensions. It is a next-generation new drug development technology called mini organs and similar organs. As it performs the function of actual human organs, it is in the spotlight as a field to identify the cause and treatment of disease or to replace animal testing in toxicity and effectiveness evaluation for new drug development. In addition, the use of organoids is expected to overcome the limitations of animal experiments in which side effects that have not been found in animals are found in humans.
One of the areas where organoids are studied a lot is 'cancer', which can become a patient's bioavatar and analyze reactivity or resistance to anticancer drugs. In addition, with the recent development of treatments for intractable brain diseases, the use of organoids is expanding. However, existing meningioma cell lines or organoids were deformed during the cultivation process, so they did not reflect the patient's tumor biological characteristics, and did not reflect the microenvironment, including only tumor cells.
Professor Ansdevan said "The newly developed meningioma organoid overcomes the limitations of previous meningioma models and has excellent similarity to actual brain tumors, which will be useful for research on identifying and selecting drugs for meningioma in the era of precision medicine."
Professor Ahn then said "Starting with the establishment of this model that can screen the most common new drugs for meningioma in the brain tumor area, we will try to be hopeful for patients with recurrence without treatment through follow-up studies."
The findings were published in the recent issue of the international journal oncology 'Cancer Cell International'.
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