Establishing pre-clinical model of luminal breast cancer at UVA

A major hurdle in studying luminal breast cancers is the lack of adequate ways to maintain cells with primary luminal characteristics in culture. Organoids cultured directly from patient tumors are a promising new tool, but their widespread use is limited by the low success rate of long-term cultures, which makes it difficult to justify sacrificing primary tumor material.
We achieved 50% success in initiating luminal breast cancer organoids from tumor scrapes without diverting tumor from standard pathology. We miniaturized the organoid format and set an endpoint of 14 days to minimize hormone receptor loss. Therapeutic targeting and parallel testing of genetic and pharmacologic perturbations in these “zero–passage” organoids yielded a breadth of organoid growth phenotypes. Zero-passage organoids are a rapid and scalable way to interrogate properties of luminal breast cancer cells from patient-derived material. A future goal is to relate inter-patient variability of zero-passage organoids to long-term outcomes.