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Development of a small cell lung cancer organoid model to study cellular interactions and survival after chemotherapy

Authors :
Chandani Sen
Caroline R. Koloff
Souvik Kundu
Dan C. Wilkinson
Juliette M. Yang
David W. Shia
Luisa K. Meneses
Tammy M. Rickabaugh
Brigitte N. Gomperts
Source :
Frontiers in Pharmacology, Vol 14 (2023)
Publication Year :
2023
Publisher :
Frontiers Media S.A., 2023.

Abstract

Introduction: Small-cell-lung-cancer (SCLC) has the worst prognosis of all lung cancers because of a high incidence of relapse after therapy. While lung cancer is the second most common malignancy in the US, only about 10% of cases of lung cancer are SCLC, therefore, it is categorized as a rare and recalcitrant disease. Therapeutic discovery for SCLC has been challenging and the existing pre-clinical models often fail to recapitulate actual tumor pathophysiology. To address this, we developed a bioengineered 3-dimensional (3D) SCLC co-culture organoid model as a phenotypic tool to study SCLC tumor kinetics and SCLC-fibroblast interactions after chemotherapy.Method: We used functionalized alginate microbeads as a scaffold to mimic lung alveolar architecture and co-cultured SCLC cell lines with primary adult lung fibroblasts (ALF). We found that SCLCs in the model proliferated extensively, invaded the microbead scaffold and formed tumors within just 7 days. We compared the bioengineered tumors with patient tumors and found them to recapitulate the pathology and immunophenotyping of the patient tumors. When treated with standard chemotherapy drugs, etoposide and cisplatin, we observed that some of the cells survived the chemotherapy and reformed the tumor in the organoid model.Result and Discussion: Co-culture of the SCLC cells with ALFs revealed that the fibroblasts play a key role in inducing faster and more robust SCLC cell regrowth in the model. This is likely due to a paracrine effect, as conditioned media from the same fibroblasts could also support this accelerated regrowth. This model can be used to study cell-cell interactions and the response to chemotherapy in SCLC and is also scalable and amenable to high throughput phenotypic or targeted drug screening to find new therapeutics for SCLC.

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
16639812
Volume :
14
Database :
Directory of Open Access Journals
Journal :
Frontiers in Pharmacology
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
edsdoj.2af5fac1373f4220879f3a52faeb2175
Document Type :
article
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2023.1211026