Question: How do you use mini organs to study liver cancer?

Nicholas Younger answered on 8 Mar 2017:

Well cancer is caused by changes in DNA which make the cells copy themselves and stops them from dying – it might sound weird, but if a cell stops working it kills itself to stop itself turning into cancer – this is called apoptosis. But when this stops working then the cells can turn into cancer.

I grow mini organs with totally normal DNA, and then I change the DNA in really precise ways and see which changes make them turn into cancer cells. This way I can find new DNA mutations which can turn liver cells into cancer cells. And that means that new medicines can be made to try and fix them – if you know how something is broken, you can figure out how to fix it.

That’s the easy answer. If you want more detail:

When a person has cancer, the cancer cells have hundreds of mutations, but maybe only 2 or 3 of those are actually causing the cancer (these are called ‘driver mutations’) and the rest aren’t doing anything to the cell (these are called ‘passenger mutations’). It’s very hard to tell which of the hundreds of mutations are drivers and which are passengers. I can use fancy computers to narrow it down, but then the mutations that the computer predicts are drivers needs to be tested, and it’s these mutations that I make in the mini organs.

This way you can figure out exactly which mutation is causing a persons cancer, and then you can treat them more specifically – called “precision medicine”.

I hope that answers your question, but if you have any more just ask away – it’s my favorite thing to talk about!