{"entity":{"id":"idea-bio1-organoid-immune-coculture","kind":"idea","name":"Grow tumour organoids together with the patient's own immune cells","aka":[],"tldr":"Lab-grown mini-tumours usually contain only cancer cells. Adding the patient's own immune cells lets researchers test immunotherapy outside the body.","summary":"Air-liquid interface organoids and reconstituted co-cultures preserve or restore tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes and myeloid cells, and have been used to model checkpoint blockade responses and to expand tumour-reactive T cells. Standardising these systems, including autologous peripheral blood mononuclear cell co-cultures with defined killing readouts, would give an ex vivo assay for immunotherapy and cell therapy that plain organoids cannot provide.","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","functional-drug-testing","til-therapy"],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":["nki"],"pathways":[],"terms":["tils","cold-vs-hot"],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":["b-preclinical-models","b-immunotherapy-response"],"keyPapers":["paper-wong-biostatistics"],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":[],"hypothesis":"A standardised organoid-immune co-culture killing assay discriminates checkpoint inhibitor responders from non-responders in a prospective cohort with accuracy better than PD-L1 immunohistochemistry.","rationale":"Immunotherapy prediction is the field's most valuable unmet biomarker problem and functional assays outperform expression markers in other settings, such as ex vivo drug sensitivity in leukaemia.","test":"Assay 150 pre-treatment samples from patients starting checkpoint therapy with blinded scoring; compare accuracy with PD-L1 and tumour mutational burden.","maturity":"preclinical-evidence","actor":"research","cost":"medium","horizonYears":4},"route":"/ideas/idea-bio1-organoid-immune-coculture/","neighbours":{"technology":[{"id":"functional-drug-testing","kind":"technology","name":"Functional (ex vivo) drug testing","route":"/technologies/functional-drug-testing/"},{"id":"organoids","kind":"technology","name":"Patient-derived organoids","route":"/technologies/organoids/"},{"id":"til-therapy","kind":"technology","name":"TIL therapy","route":"/technologies/til-therapy/"}],"institution":[{"id":"nki","kind":"institution","name":"Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI-AvL)","route":"/institutions/nki/"}],"term":[{"id":"cold-vs-hot","kind":"term","name":"Hot vs cold tumours","route":"/terms/cold-vs-hot/"},{"id":"tils","kind":"term","name":"Tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs)","route":"/terms/tils/"}],"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-immunotherapy-response","kind":"bottleneck","name":"No one can predict who responds to immunotherapy","route":"/bottlenecks/b-immunotherapy-response/"}],"paper":[{"id":"paper-wong-biostatistics","kind":"paper","name":"Estimation of clinical trial success rates and related parameters","route":"/key-papers/paper-wong-biostatistics/"}]}}