Author Spotlight: Advancing Personalized Medicine in Ovarian Cancer

The best clinical management in cutting-edge translational research for patients with advanced ovarian cancer has highest priority at our institution. With the biobanking of patient-derived organoids, we have achieved major progress towards individually-tailored management. This enables us to evaluate patient-specific characteristics and to identify predictive biomarkers.

We have made significant advances in recent years in improving radical multivisceral surgery, chemotherapy, anti-angiogenic therapy, and also PARP inhibitor therapy in patients with advanced ovarian cancer and improved survival rates even with that. Now, the next big step would be to better predict which patient would benefit from which specific treatment. Currently, clinical treatment decisions are based on general histopathological features and on information on homologous recommendation deficiency or tested in paraffin-embedded tumor tissue.

Biologic models that evaluate specific responses to chemotherapy and to targeted treatments have not yet been implemented in clinical routine. We have identified key characteristics of ovarian cancer tissue, specifically the culture requirements necessary to sustain its renewal potential in vitro, and use this knowledge to achieve robust long-term growth of organoid lines and establish biobank from samples at various stages of the disease. Our day-to-day experience in biobanking of ovarian cancer organoids effectively shows a remarkable heterogeneity in the biology of this malignancy, which could pave the way to new classification or provide the basis for new therapeutic solutions targeting STEMI’s potential.