Development of prostate cancer organoid culture models in basic medicine and translational research

Abstract

Prostate cancer (PC) is the most prevalent cancer in men and the second main cause of cancer-related death in Western society. The lack of proper PC models that recapitulate the molecular and genomic landscape of clinical disease has hampered progress toward translational research to understand the disease initiation, progression, and therapeutic responses in each patient. Although several models have been developed, they hardly emulated the complicated PC microenvironment. Precision medicine is an emerging approach predicting appropriate therapies for individual cancer patients by means of various analyses of individual genomic profiling and targeting specific cancer pathways. In PC, precision medicine also has the potential to impose changes in clinical practices. Here, we describe the various PC models with special focus on PC organoids and their values in basic medicine, personalized therapy, and translational researches in vitro and in vivo, which could help to achieve the full transformative power of cancer precision medicine.