The OvaCure Collection:
A New Organoid Platform
to Boost Ovarian Cancer Research
Traditional biobanks do not have enough relevant primary tumor tissue, and are therefore very restrictive in sharing with research groups. This results in a critical bottleneck for research and developing new diagnoses and treatment options.
Organoids are a breakthrough technology where primary tumor tissue are expanded into DNA-stable cultures identical to the primary tumor tissue, only now up to 1000 times larger in volume. This will allow more research groups accessibility to more tissue, thus opening up new research collaborations.
Other cancers have large organoid banks, but not ovarian cancer. We want to build this together with a comprehensive database of information per culture. The initiative will be non-profit, and to gain access to the biobank, each research group agrees to report all their research information back into the database so that it continuously becomes more data-rich for the next research project.
The Organoids
Organoids are self-organized 3D tissue cultures that mimic functional, structural and biological complexity of the donor tissue. Organoids are thus deemed to represent individual tumors they are derived from, but more importantly they are easier to scale up, as these are in vitro cultures, not living animals. In other words, organoids merge advantages of both cell lines and in vivo models as they are easy to work with and have a scalability similar to cell lines and preservation of original tumor characteristics similar to PDX models.
Each organoid culture is validated and characterized using whole-genome sequencing (WGS), and RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) to demonstrate that the organoids are genetically and phenotypically representative of the original patient samples after long-term culture. The purpose of deep whole-genome sequencing and RNA-seq is not only model validation, but also increasing their applicability in both basic and translational research projects.
The organoids available in the collection are from patients with high-grade serous ovarian cancer tumors.
The Collaborators
OvaCure is based in Copenhagen, and The OvaCure Collection is based on a close collaboration with Professor Krister Wennerberg and his research group (BRIC, University of Copenhagen), who are among the world’s leading organoid experts. Based on the acclaimed organoid platform developed by Senkowski et al. from Professor Krister Wennerberg Group, the cryo-preserved donor tissue is grown, validated and expanded into stable, well-characterized organoid cultures.
The primary tumor samples are expanded from patients at TYKS (Turku University Hospital, Finland) by Professor Sakari Hietanen and adjunct Professor Johanna Hynninen.
Data of the DNA and RNA sequencing as well as the surgery, pathology reports and the clinical records are sources for deep data analysis made available for subsequent requests. The team under Professor Sampsa Hautaniemi (FI) at Helsinki University is responsible for the underlying data structure as well as genomic and transcriptomic data processing and analysis.
