Foremost among these has been the low success rate in deriving these cell

lines from patient biopsies in the past, with the result that some tumour types are very poorly represented (e.g. prostate cancer) and the cell lines available do not completely capture the genetic diversity present in the patient population. It is possible therefore to envisage the ideal scenario for derivation of a new panel of cancer cell lines, where phenotypically stable cells could be generated with high success rates from patient biopsies together with clinical data and where matched normal tissue from the same CP 868596 patient could also be cultured for experimental assays. Recently the Clevers lab has recently shown that it is possible to establish TSA HDAC mouse long-term cultures from a variety of adult mouse and human primary tissues and cancers (‘organoids’), which can be expanded for many months in vitro without genetic or phenotypic changes [31 and 32•]. The essential ingredients of the Matrigel-based 3D organoid cultures are a combination of specific growth factors known to exert strong agonistic effects on critical signalling pathways. Currently, organoid cultures can be made routinely for colon, stomach, and liver [32•, 33 and 34]. Protocols for their derivation from pancreas, prostate and lung cancers are

also being developed. These organoid cultures will need to be extensively characterised to determine their stability over time and to what degree they match the original cancer biopsy, but the development of this technology raises the possibility of generating a new panel of tumour organoid cultures to replace the current 1000 cancer cell lines that are currently available. These developments are the specific focus

of an article in this edition of Current Opinion in Genetics and Development Methocarbamol (‘Organoid cultures for the analysis of cancer phenotypes’). Remarkable advances in DNA sequencing technologies are transforming our ability to define the mutational burden of any given cancer and in the near future these data will become a routine part of the clinical decision-making process to stratify patients for treatment. In order to empower clinicians to interpret how these mutations can affect cancer treatment outcome there will be a continual need for model systems to functionally link these genomic alterations with drug response. Cancer cell lines screened at sufficient scale to capture the existing genetic diversity provide a route into defining the patient subgroups that are more likely to respond to any given therapy. Furthermore, many of the current disadvantages of the current cancer cell lines will potentially be overcome in the near future by their replacement with potentially even larger panels of tumour organoid models.