With the development of a patient-specific organ-on-a-chip, Dr. Lorenzo Ferri at The Institute and collaborators at Harvard are advancing personalized cancer medicine
Patients with advanced cancer who are still eligible for surgery typically receive neoadjuvant chemotherapy to shrink the tumour and improve surgical outcomes. However, some tumours are resistant to treatment—and clinicians currently have no way of knowing in advance which patients will benefit from chemotherapy.
Thanks to a breakthrough in precision oncology led by Lorenzo Ferri, MD, PhD, at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (The Institute) and Dr. Donald Ingber at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, this reality could soon change. Together, they have developed a small device called an organ-on-a-chip, or organ chip, which recreates a patient’s cancer and surrounding tissues to predict how it will respond to treatment. This technology could help physicians avoid giving patients therapies unlikely to work for them, and instead guide them toward options with a greater chance of success.