Exploring the Potential of Drug Response Assays for Precision Medicine in Ovarian Cancer

Abstract

One of the major challenges in the treatment of cancer are differential responses of patients to existing standard of care anti-cancer drugs. These differential responses may, in part, be due to a diverse range of genomic, epigenomic, proteomic, and metabolic alterations among individuals suffering from the same type of cancer. Precision medicine is an emerging approach in cancer therapeutics that takes into account specific molecular alterations, environmental factors as well as lifestyle of individual patients. This approach allows clinicians and researchers to select or predict treatments that would most likely benefit the patient based on their individual tumor characteristics. One class of precision medicine tools are predictive, in vitro drug-response assays designed to test the sensitivity of patient tumor cells to existing or novel therapies. These assays have the potential to rapidly identify the most effective treatments for cancer patients and thus hold great promise in the field of precision medicine. In this review, we have highlighted several drug-response assays developed in ovarian cancer and discussed the current challenges and future prospects of these assays in the clinical management of this disease.

Tunneling nanotubes, TNT, communicate glioblastoma with surrounding non-tumor astrocytes to adapt them to hypoxic and metabolic tumor conditions

“…Interestingly, TNT are the only communication system that enables targeted and selected pathogenic material transfer, including defective or compromised mitochondria. Thus, blocking TNT formation and associated communication could provide an additional treatment to reduce tumor adaptation and prevent chemotherapeutic resistance, as we recently demonstrated 86 , 100 – 104 . Also, as TNT are not expressed in healthy adult tissues, thus, we could expect minimal side effects.…”

“…The mitochondrial and lipid droplet interaction has been proposed as a general mechanism to rescue damaged cells and has been associated with several genetic diseases 86 – 89 . To denote the “power” of transferred mitochondria, microinjection of intact mitochondria into oocytes prevented apoptosis 90 .…”

Analogs of a Natural Peptaibol Exert Anticancer Activity in Both Cisplatin- and Doxorubicin-Resistant Cells and in Multicellular Tumor Spheroids

“…In ascitic fluid, OvCa cells exfoliate from the primary tumor, and aggregate to form OvCa stem cell-enriched MCTSs and heterospheroids [14,33], which contribute to drug resistance and spreading to secondary sites [33,34]. MCTSs, obtained by cultivation of tumor cells under non-adherent conditions, mimic tumor growth in ascitic fluid, resemble avascular micrometastases, and are thus considered effective three-dimensional (3D) first-line approaches for the screening of novel anticancer drugs [35,36]. Thus, to test peptaibols activity, we used SKOV3 cells, which are able to form large and dense spheroids and evaluated SKOV3-MCTS volume and cell viability (Figure 3).…”

Therapy for Recurrent High-Grade Epithelial Ovarian Cancer—The Current Status and Future Trends

“…These assays need to be validated through well-designed prospective and blinded multicenter clinical trials for further use in clinical practice. 57…”