Resumen
Pancreatic cancer is a devastating disease with a 5-year survival rate of 12%. Only about 20% of patients are candidates for curative surgery, while the majority receive palliative chemotherapy or best supportive care. Recently, testing chemotherapeutical agents on patient-derived 3-dimensional cultures (organoids) of cancer cells has provided hope that personalized treatment may soon become a reality. However, most of these models only include tumor cells and not cells of the supporting tissue, which have been shown to play a critical role in cancer progression. In this study, we created a co-culture including both tumor and stromal cells from endoscopic ultrasound-guided biopsies and showed that an interaction occurs between the cell types in our model. It may therefore be a step towards better prediction of therapeutic response in the future. We also discuss the limitations of creating these types of models by using endoscopic biopsies from primary tumors.