Personalization of the medical treatment of solid tumours using patient-derived tumour explants (Review)

Improving the pre-clinical characterization of therapeutic approaches and developing new biological assays that will enable treatment personalization for individual patients are promising developments in oncology. Here we describe a new approach consisting of culturing human tumour explants. This approach involves the preparation of slices from freshly-obtained, surgically-resected material that can be maintained ex vivo for several days. Recent studies have provided proof of principle that this approach can be easily implemented in order to explore the mode of action of various anticancer drugs and the responses of 'real' tumours at the individual patient level. We present the practical aspects and highlight the versatility of this approach, which allows for the analysis of the susceptibility of any individual tumour to multiple anticancer drugs in parallel. We discuss its potential as a companion assay in the design of optimal clinical trials and as a guide for the prescription of medical treatment. We discuss which future clinical and biological studies are needed to validate the information gathered from cultured tumour explants, and to integrate this information with that gathered from other assays in order to optimize the medical treatment of cancer.