Organoid culture system for patient-derived lung metastatic osteosarcoma

Osteosarcoma (OS) is the most common primary bone malignancy with high rates of recurrence and metastasis. OS often spreads to lungs, an optimized model for studying lung metastatic OS cells may help develop potential therapies for patients with lung metastasis. Here we firstly report an organoid culture system for lung metastatic OS tissues. We provided a fully described formula that was required for establishing lung metastatic OS organoids (OSOs). Using this protocol, the lung OSOs were able to be maintained and serially propagated for at least six months; the OSOs can also be generated from cryopreserved patient samples without damaging the morphology. The patient-derived lung OSOs retained the cellular morphology and expression of OS markers (Vimentin and Sox9) that recapitulate the histological features of the human OS. The microenvironment of primary lung metastatic OSOs preserved a similar T cell distribution with the human lung OS lesions; this provided a possible condition to explore how OS cells may react to immunotherapy. OSOs established from this protocol can be further utilized for studying various aspects of OS biology (e.g., tumorigenesis and drug screen/discovery) for precision medicine.