For decades, most laboratory cancer biology has relied on cell lines: tumor cells grown flat on plastic, some established in the mid-twentieth century, adapting to culture with each passing year. They are cheap, durable, and enormously productive. They are also a narrow slice of what human cancer actually looks like; they arrive with no clinical history attached, and there is no way to check any result against the tumor a cell line came from.
Researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and five UK clinical sites have now built something different: 256 tumor organoids grown directly from patients with colorectal, esophageal, gastric, pancreatic and ovarian cancers, each linked to the donor's clinical record and matched tumor tissue. Then they went through 162 of them, switching genes off, one at a time, to see which ones the cancers could not do without.
