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Review
. 2025 Jul;11(7):665-675.
doi: 10.1016/j.trecan.2025.03.005. Epub 2025 Apr 3.

The future of tumor organoids in precision therapy

Seok-Young Kim  1 , Marc van de Wetering  1 , Hans Clevers  2 , Karin Sanders  3
Affiliations
Free article
Review

The future of tumor organoids in precision therapy

Seok-Young Kim et al. Trends Cancer. 2025 Jul.
Free article

Abstract

Tumoroids are cultures of patient-derived tumor cells, which are grown in 3D in the presence of an extracellular matrix extract and specific growth factors. Tumoroids can be generated from adult as well as pediatric cancers, including epithelial cancers, sarcomas, and brain cancers. Tumoroids retain multi-omic characteristics of their corresponding tumor and recapitulate interpatient and intratumor heterogeneity. Retrospective and prospective studies have demonstrated that tumoroids predict patient responses to anticancer therapies, making them a promising tool for precision oncology. However, several challenges remain before tumoroids can be fully integrated into clinical decision-making, including success rates of tumoroid establishment and turnaround times. This review discusses the current advances, challenges, and future directions of tumoroid-based models in cancer research and precision therapy.

Keywords: cancer organoid; personalized cancer treatment; tumoroid.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of interests H.C. is an inventor on patents held by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences that cover organoid technology. He is cofounder of Xilis and is inventor on a patent covering the MCLA-158 antibody. He is currently head of pharma Research and Early Development (pRED) at Roche, Basel, Switzerland. H.C.’s full disclosure is given at https://www.uu.nl/staff/JCClevers/. The other authors declare no competing interests.

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