{"entity":{"id":"idea-bio1-organoid-cell-therapy-potency","kind":"idea","name":"Use patient organoids to check a cell therapy will work before infusing it","aka":[],"tldr":"Cell therapies are tested for purity and count, but not for whether they can actually kill that patient's tumour. Testing them against the patient's own mini-tumour would show this.","summary":"Release criteria for CAR-T and TIL products measure viability, transduction and sterility, not tumour-specific cytotoxicity. Co-culturing an aliquot of the product with the patient's own organoid or tumour slice gives a functional potency assay with a killing readout. This could flag likely non-responders before lymphodepletion, and provide a comparator when choosing between products or targets.","asOf":"2026-09-08","links":[{"label":"Bottleneck evidence (Lab models that fail to predict what happens in patients): Wong, Siah & Lo, Estimation of clinical trial success rates (Biostatistics 2019)","url":"https://doi.org/10.1093/biostatistics/kxx069"}],"tags":[],"related":[],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":["organoids","car-t","til-therapy"],"targets":[],"drugs":["lifileucel"],"companies":["iovance"],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":[],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":["b-preclinical-models","b-manufacturing-cell-therapy"],"keyPapers":["paper-wong-biostatistics"],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":[],"hypothesis":"Ex vivo killing of the patient's own organoid by the manufactured product predicts clinical response, and products failing a defined potency threshold have a markedly lower response rate.","rationale":"Product potency varies widely and correlates with T-cell fitness in reported series; a patient-specific functional assay is the most direct measure and can be run during the manufacturing window.","test":"Prospective blinded correlation in 60 patients receiving CAR-T or TIL therapy, comparing organoid killing scores with response at three months.","maturity":"speculative","actor":"research","cost":"medium","horizonYears":4},"route":"/ideas/idea-bio1-organoid-cell-therapy-potency/","neighbours":{"technology":[{"id":"car-t","kind":"technology","name":"CAR-T cell therapy","route":"/technologies/car-t/"},{"id":"organoids","kind":"technology","name":"Patient-derived organoids","route":"/technologies/organoids/"},{"id":"til-therapy","kind":"technology","name":"TIL therapy","route":"/technologies/til-therapy/"}],"drug":[{"id":"lifileucel","kind":"drug","name":"Lifileucel","route":"/drugs/lifileucel/"}],"company":[{"id":"iovance","kind":"company","name":"Iovance Biotherapeutics","route":"/companies/iovance/"}],"bottleneck":[{"id":"b-preclinical-models","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Lab models that fail to predict what happens in patients","route":"/bottlenecks/b-preclinical-models/"},{"id":"b-manufacturing-cell-therapy","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Manufacturing cost and time for living and radioactive medicines","route":"/bottlenecks/b-manufacturing-cell-therapy/"}],"paper":[{"id":"paper-wong-biostatistics","kind":"paper","name":"Estimation of clinical trial success rates and related parameters","route":"/key-papers/paper-wong-biostatistics/"}]}}