ORganoid GeneratioN Study for Cancer

People who develop cancer can often be cured if they are suitable for surgery or radiotherapy. However, a proportion of these cancers return, at which point the available treatment options are often not very effective. Our understanding of the biology of many cancers is limited, and we don't understand why some cancers are cured by surgery or radiotherapy and some are not. A better understanding of the biology of cancers could help develop new treatments, or improvements to current treatments, and this might increase the number of patients who can be cured of their disease.

One way to improve the understanding we have of the biology is to look in detail at cancer samples taken from the from patients. The problem with this is that often samples are small, and the tumour tissue sample itself already dead once removed from where it was growing, which can limit the analyses that are possible. A potential solution for this is to take cancer tissue from patients and try to directly grow the cells in the laboratory. Keeping the cancer cells alive in the laboratory can be difficult but has been shown to be possible in a number of different types of cancer. This kind of model is sometimes known as an "organoid". If successfully established, it means more tests can be done to find out how the cancer is working.

This study is looking at collecting samples of a person's cancer to see if we can develop these models from patients being treated for different cancers. We will ask people who are having surgery for cancer whether we can take samples from their tumour to try and achieve this. Some additional blood tests will be taken alongside the usual blood tests before and after surgery, without an additional blood draw, and before and again after any adjuvant therapy is completed. A collection of saliva will also be requested at these times and we will ask people whether they are happy for us to collect any previous tissue samples, or nay that are subsequently collected when they are being followed up, to allow comparison with the samples collected as part of this study.

The main goal of this study is to see if organoids can be established in our laboratories. If these models are successfully established, we will compare them to the original tumour to check they are a good match biologically. After this we can use them to understand how the cancer works and try out new treatments.