Organoids Provide an Important Window on Inflammation in Cancer

Inflammation is a primary driver of cancer initiation and progression. However, the complex and dynamic nature of an inflammatory response make this a very difficult process to study. Organoids are a new model system where complex multicellular structures of primary cells can be grown in a 3D matrix to recapitulate the biology of the parent tissue. This experimental model offers several distinct advantages over alternatives including the ability to be genetically engineered, implanted in vivo and reliably derived from a wide variety of normal and cancerous tissue from patients. Furthermore, long-term organoid cultures reproduce many features of their source tissue, including genetic and epigenetic alterations and drug sensitivity. Perhaps most significantly, cancer organoids can be cocultured in a variety of different systems with a patients’ own immune cells, uniquely permitting the study of autologous cancer-immune cell interactions. Experiments with such systems promise to shed light on the mechanisms governing inflammation-associated cancer while also providing prognostic information on an individual patient’s responsiveness to immunotherapeutic anti-cancer drugs. Thanks to their ability to capture important features of the complex relationship between a cancer and its microenvironment, organoids are poised to become an essential tool for unraveling the mechanisms by which inflammation promotes cancer.