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Organoids reveal cancer dynamics

Single-cell analyses in cancer are limited by the small biomass of individual cells. In vitro production of 3D organoid structures from single tumour-derived cells generates sufficient biomass for in-depth analyses.
  1. Calvin J. Kuo

    1. Calvin J. Kuo is in the Division of Hematology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford Cancer Institute, Stanford, California 94305, USA.

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  2. Christina Curtis

    1. Christina Curtis is in the Division of Oncology and the Department of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California 94305, USA.

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Cancer is thought to arise from a single cell that proliferates to form a clonal population. Cells in that population then progressively acquire distinct mutations, leading to rampant tumour-cell diversification. Ideally, this intratumoral heterogeneity would be studied at the single-cell level — but such explorations are limited because single cells contain very little material for analysis. In a paper in Nature, Roerink et al.1 overcome this limitation using methods for growing 3D cultures from single cells isolated from colorectal cancers. These organoid cultures can be used as proxies for the single cells from which they are derived, enabling in-depth analysis of tumour diversity.

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Nature 556, 441-442 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-03841-x

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