The cancer angiogenesis co-culture assay: In vitro quantification of the angiogenic potential of tumoroids

Sarah Line Bring Truelsen, Nabi Mousavi, Haoche Wei, Lucy Harvey, Rikke Stausholm, Erik Spillum, Grith Hagel, Klaus Qvortrup, Ole Thastrup, Henrik Harling, Harry Mellor, Jacob Thastrup*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

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Abstract

The treatment response to anti-angiogenic agents varies among cancer patients and predictive biomarkers are needed to identify patients with resistant cancer or guide the choice of anti-angiogenic treatment. We present "the Cancer Angiogenesis Co-Culture (CACC) assay", an in vitro Functional Precision Medicine assay which enables the study of tumouroinduced angiogenesis. This assay can quantify the ability of a patient-derived tumouroto induce vascularization by measuring the induction of tube formation in a co-culture of vascular cells and tumoroids established from the primary colorectal tumour or a metastasis. Furthermore, the assay can quantify the sensitivity of patient-derived tumoroids to antiangiogenic therapies. We observed that tube formation increased in a dose-dependent manner upon treatment with the pro-angiogenic factor vascular endothelial growth factor A (VEGF-A). When investigating the angiogenic potential of tumoroids from 12 patients we found that 9 tumorocultures induced a significant increase in tube formation compared to controls without tumoroids. In these 9 angiogenic tumorocultures the tube formation could be abolished by treatment with one or more of the investigated anti-angiogenic agents. The 3 non-angiogenic tumorocultures secreted VEGF-A but we observed no correlation between the amount of tube formation and tumoroid-secreted VEGF-A. Our data suggests that the CACC assay recapitulates the complexity of tumour angiogenesis, and when clinically verified, could prove a valuable tool to quantify sensitivity towards different anti-angiogenic agents.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere0253258
JournalPLoS ONE
Volume16
Issue number7 July
Number of pages22
ISSN1932-6203
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2021

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Copyright © 2021 Truelsen et al.

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