A tissue engineering platform to identify target combinations in tumour stoma to render tumours therapy sensitive

许多癌症类型的存活率很低，因此需要开发新的治疗方法。制药公司面临的一个主要挑战是确定最有希望对患者有效的药物。目前，新药是在2D塑料培养皿中培养的细胞上进行测试的。然而，使用这种方法的研究并不能准确预测药物对患者的效果。造成二维培养皿可预测性差的一个原因是，环境与患者的真实肿瘤非常不同，细胞特性（以及它们对药物的反应）强烈依赖于它们的局部环境。我们需要更好地概括肿瘤环境的模型，并允许对新药进行准确评估，以确保最有希望的治疗方法更快地到达患者手中。我们已经开发出一种策略来设计人工肿瘤，使这种分析成为可能。在这里，我们将评估我们的新方法与标准2D培养皿相比的好处，然后使用我们的平台测试新药治疗头颈癌的有效性。

Survival rates for many cancer types are poor and there is a need for new therapies to be developed. A major challengefaced by drug companies is identifying the most promising drugs that will be effective in patients. Currently new drugs aretested on cells cultured in 2D plastic dishes. Studies using this approach however, do not accurately predict how well thedrug will work in patients. One reason contributing to the poor predictability of 2D dishes is that the environment is verydifferent from that in a real tumor in a patient and cell properties (and how they respond to a drug) are strongly dependent ontheir local environment. A need exists for models that better recapitulate the tumor environment and allow an accurateassessment of new drug to ensure the most promising therapies reach patients faster. We have developed a strategy toengineer artificial tumours in which such analysis is possible. Here we will assess the benefits of our new approachcompared to standard 2D dishes and then use our platform to test the effectiveness of new drugs to treat head and neckcancer.