The organoid's cells and structures can interact with each other just like in a real organ in a living organism in three dimensions, instead of traditional cell cultures grown on flat, 2D surfaces. This allows scientists to study much more complex biological processes.
"The hope was that these organoids would replicate the tissue architecture of dog lung cancer better than any previous attempts at cell cultures," said Tatsuya Usui corresponding author of the study and Associate Professor at the Division of Animal Life Science with Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology.
They found that different strains of canine lung cancers exhibited varying sensitivity to anti-cancer drugs, opening the door to the potential for personalized treatment approaches. Perhaps most tantalizingly, the cancerous organoid displayed enrichment in the Mitogen-Activated Protein Kinase signaling pathway, also known more simply as the MEK-signaling pathway, a promising avenue for intervention, as its molecular processes enable transmission of information from receptors on the surface of a cell to the DNA in its nucleus.