Cell 174, 1–13 (2018)

It is now possible to model the interactions between tumors and reactive autologous T cells using organoids cultured with peripheral blood lymphocytes.

Treating melanoma by expanding a patient’s own tumor-reactive T cells ex vivo and returning them to that patient has shown great success; however, this treatment is not yet applicable to all cancers, and not all patients with melanoma respond for reasons that are unknown.

Emile Voest and his colleagues from the Netherlands Cancer Institute cultured colon cancer organoids or non-small-cell lung cancer organoids with autologous blood. They found that this activated tumor-reactive T cells in the culture, and these cells killed the organoids. This culture system could be used both to study the interactions between tumors and T cells and to generate the T cell product that is reinfused back into patients for treatment.