Fine-Needle Aspiration improved the success rate of organoid generation and assists personalized-therapies for EGFR+ combined small cell lung cancer patients

Recent studies focused on the exploring the potential diagnostic clinical values of patient-derived lung cancer organoids (LCOs) have found promising results. However, varied generation success rates limited the broad application of LCOs. In this study, 80 tumor samples from 73 patients were used to generated LCO models. The effects of intervention factors and clinical factors on the success rate of LCO generation were analyzed. The results confirmed that both intervention factors such as samplings methods and clinical factors could affect the success generation of LCO. Further analysis of the samplings methods has found that fine-needle aspiration (FNA) sampling has higher success rate of LCO generation as compared to corn needle biopsy (CNB) sampling at a parallel manner. In addition, FNA biopsy samples derived LCOs preserved the pathological characteristics of parental tumor tissue and exhibited individualized drug responses against both chemo- and targeted therapeutic regimes. Furthermore, the outcome of these LCO model-based drug sensitivity test provided valuable data, which could guide the personalized therapy for patient with small-cell lung cancer combined with EGFR gene mutation. In conclusion, this study has demonstrated a possible method to facilitate LCO generation and provided preliminary data indicate that the generated LCO could be a potential clinically tractable model facilitate precision medicine within the therapeutic time window.