Brain organoids get cancer, too, opening a new frontier in personalized medicine
Researchers are giving cancer to miniature human brains, called organoids, in hopes of personalizing glioblastoma care to an unprecedented degree.
NEW YORK — In 30 years as an oncologist, Dr. Howard Fine estimates he has treated some 20,000 patients with glioblastomas, the most deadly form of brain cancer, “and almost all of them are dead.” Of the 100 new glioblastoma patients he saw last month, “five years from now, only three will be alive,” he said.
During a conversation this month in his office at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, Fine rattled off more dismal stats, like the many failed of experimental drugs for glioblastoma; like the paltry increase in life expectancy for people with glioblastoma from 12 months in 1990 to 15 today; like the stupid (in hindsight) assumptions about how glioblastomas grow and how to study them in mice.
