New avatars to personalize cancer treatment
Published: Wednesday, Dec 18th 2024, 13:10
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New tumor models aim to improve the treatment of cancer. The "lymphomoids" developed by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne should make it possible to test the effectiveness of treatments in the laboratory and better predict individual reactions.
Conventional methods for testing the effectiveness of lymphoma therapies are limited, as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) explained in a press release on Wednesday. The problem is that every tumor responds to different therapies. This also applies to lymphomas, a type of blood cancer that originates in lymphocytes, a subgroup of immune cells.
Recently, scientists have therefore begun to develop "tumor avatars", new systems that can be used to store cells or tissue samples outside the patient's body.
However, it was difficult to preserve the original cell structure and composition of lymphomas. However, researchers led by Albert Santamaria-Martínez and Elisa Oricchio from EPFL have now succeeded in preserving tissue fragments of a lymphoma outside the body for several days. They presented the new model in the journal "Nature Communications".
According to the EPFL, this made it possible to investigate how the samples reacted to various drugs. These reactions reflected the clinical reactions of the patients from whom the tissue samples were taken.
According to the university, these research results suggest that lymphomoids can serve as a reliable tool for predicting individual response to specific treatments.
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