Systematic review: predictive value of organoids in colorectal cancer.

While chemotherapy alone or in combination with radiotherapy and surgery are important modalities in the treatment of colorectal cancer, their widespread use is not paired with an abundance of diagnostic tools to match individual patients with the most effective standard-of-care chemo- or radiotherapy regimens. Patient-derived organoids are tumour-derived structures that have been shown to retain certain aspects of the tissue of origin. We present here a systematic review of studies that have tested the performance of patient derived organoids to predict the effect of anti-cancer therapies in colorectal cancer, for chemotherapies, targeted drugs, and radiation therapy, and we found overall a positive predictive value of 68% and a negative predictive value of 78% for organoid informed treatment, which outperforms response rates observed with empirically guided treatment selection.

Author Correction: High-throughput screening reveals higher synergistic effect of MEK inhibitor combinations in colon cancer spheroids.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

High-throughput screening reveals higher synergistic effect of MEK inhibitor combinations in colon cancer spheroids.

Drug combinations have been proposed to combat drug resistance, but putative treatments are challenged by low bench-to-bed translational efficiency. To explore the effect of cell culture format and readout methods on identification of synergistic drug combinations in vitro, we studied response to 21 clinically relevant drug combinations in standard planar (2D) layouts and physiologically more relevant spheroid (3D) cultures of HCT-116, HT-29 and SW-620 cells. By assessing changes in viability, confluency and spheroid size, we were able to identify readout- and culture format-independent synergies, as well as synergies specific to either culture format or readout method.