Author Spotlight: Investigating Liver Cancer Pathogenesis Using Patient-Derived Organoids

Our lab aims to investigate the molecular pathogenesis of liver cancer and identify novel therapeutic targets for drug development. We would like to answer how cancer initiates, metastasis, and progress to drug tolerance utilizing novel disease models such as patient derived organoids. The current experimental challenges are in two aspects.

First, there is a lack of complete set of protocols for constructing hepatocellular carcinoma organoids for the whole process. Second, the size of cultured HCC organoids is too small for subsequent experimental processing. In this protocol, we provide the details of the optimized organoids culture and subsequent transfer and freezing procedures, as well as the precautions to be taken during all the procedures.

We optimized the composition of the organoid medium for organoids with close to the original tissue characteristics. We may monitor the tumor evolution using the patient-derived organoids and try to identify novel molecular and therapeutic targets for HCC treatment.