Culture media composition influences patient-derived organoids ability to predict therapeutic response in gastrointestinal cancers

In this study, we have generated patient-derived organoids (PDOs) from primary and metastatic lesions of gastrointestinal cancers, including pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, colorectal adenocarcinoma, and cholangiocarcinoma and evaluated their ability to predict donor tumor drug response. Specifically, we examined individual PDO responses to therapeutic agents with the observed clinical responses of donor patients to the same treatments and demonstrated an approximately 80% concordance rate. Importantly, we found a profound influence of culture media in PDOs phenotypes, we observed a significant difference in response to common PDAC chemotherapies, distinct morphologies, and transcriptomes between media in the same PDOs. These studies demonstrate the important role of culture media when using PDOs to inform patient care and predict response across a spectrum of GI cancers. We compared transcriptome data from pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma patient-derived organoids in two media (WNT and PaTOM). Overall design: mRNA was extracted patient-derived PDAC organoids and RNA profiles were created using Illumina HiSeq 4000.