Invitrocue’s Onco-PDO technology grows liver cancer outside of body

Invitrocue (ASX: IVQ) has again validated its Onco-PDO technology by successfully growing liver cancer outside the human body, opening the door for liver cancer sufferers to receive more personalised drug treatment plans.

Using Onco-PDO technology, Invitrocue researchers have been able to culture a variety of patient-derived cancer cells in the laboratory. The cultures or organoids can then be tested against a panel of drugs to facilitate personalised drug treatments in patients and improve outcomes.

Recently published in the Biomaterials journal, the study involved using patient-derived tumour tissue to grow 14 the liver cancer hepatocellular carcinoma organoids, which closely represented the actual human tumour biology.

“Despite the fact that hepatocellular carcinoma tumours are typically harder to grow outside the human body in relation to solid tumour cells, our approach has also been found to bear a high degree of similarity to the actual hepatocellular carcinoma tumour cells within the patient body, which makes an ideal preclinical drug model,” Invitrocue co-founder Professor Hanry Yu said.

Meanwhile, Invitrocue chief executive officer Steven Fang said the study’s publication paved the way for using the company’s Onco-PDO technology for further studies in hepatocellular carcinoma drug development and predicting the treatment response for individual patients.

Previous successful studies using the Onco-PDO technology in growing other cancers have also been published with two appearing last year in Nature Communications and Nature Medicine.

The World Health Organisation predicts cancer incidences could surge from 14.1 million new cases in 2012 to 22 million by 2030.

Liver cancer is one of the world’s leading causes of cancer death, with hepatocellular carcinoma making up 90% of liver cancer cases.

Currently, tumours are grown on mice for preclinical testing, which can be costly and time-consuming.

According to Invitrocue, there is a “significant” unmet need for its preclinical Onco-PDO platform which can offer patients targeted therapies.

Shares in Invitrocue lifted more than 11% to end the day at A$0.10.