Abstract
Cancer immunotherapy has transformed the landscape of adult cancer treatment and holds a great promise to treat paediatric malignancies. However, in vitro test coculture systems to evaluate the efficacy of immunotherapies on representative paediatric tumour models are lacking. Here, we describe a detailed procedure for the establishment of an ex vivo test coculture system of paediatric tumour organoids and immune cells that enables assessment of different immunotherapy approaches in paediatric tumour organoids. We provide a step-by-step protocol for an efficient generation of patient-derived diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) and neuroblastoma organoids stably expressing eGFP-ffLuc transgenes using defined serum-free medium. In contrast to the chromium-release assay, the new platform allows for visualization, monitoring and robust quantification of tumour organoid cell cytotoxicity using a non-radioactive assay in real-time. To evaluate the utility of this system for drug testing in the paediatric immuno-oncology field, we tested our in vitro assay using a clinically used immunotherapy strategy for children with high-risk neuroblastoma, dinutuximab (anti-GD2 monoclonal antibody), on GD2 proficient and deficient patient-derived neuroblastoma organoids. We demonstrated the feasibility and sensitivity of our ex vivo coculture system using human immune cells and paediatric tumour organoids as ex vivo tumour models. Our study provides a novel platform for personalized testing of potential anticancer immunotherapies for aggressive paediatric cancers such as neuroblastoma and DIPG.
Highlights
To overcome the above limitations, we developed a bioluminescence-based ex vivo coculture system to enable the assessment of different immunotherapy approaches in paediatric tumour organoids
The transduction efficiency was higher than 30% in all tumour organoids (Figures 2 and 3). enhanced green fluorescent protein (eGFP) positive cells were selected using FACS when transduction efficiency is lower than 70%
We describe the development of coculture models of paediatric tumour organoids and immune cells for ex vivo bioluminescence-based cytotoxicity studies
Summary
Recent developments in cancer immunotherapy hold great promise to treat aggressive paediatric malignancies such as high-risk neuroblastoma and diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) [1,2]. The establishment of robust ex vivo coculture systems of paediatric tumour cells and immune cells is of great importance to accelerate the pace of translating novel immunotherapeutics into clinical applications. Recent advances in organoid technology have paved the way to generate more physiologically relevant and personalized preclinical tumour models. These are well suited for use in coculture systems to study drug effects dependent on interactions between tumour cells and other cells in the tumour microenvironment such as immunotherapeutics
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