The recent development of human organoids as patient-specific models of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA) has helped set the stage for a new era of personalized medicine. Organoids can be generated from a resected PDA tumor in as little as 2-4 weeks, and are amenable to therapeutic screening as well as genetic and biochemical perturbation. Moreover, because these models promote the propagation of the neoplastic PDA cells at the expense of the stromal cells, transcriptome and genome-wide sequencing of organoids offers an unprecedented view of the genetic and expression changes occurring in the neoplastic cells of individual tumors. Here, we describe methods to generate PDA organoid cultures from resected human tumor specimens. We also describe how to propagate, cryopreserve, and thaw human PDA organoid cultures.
Keywords: 3D culture; Organoids; Pancreatic cancer; Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma; Patient-derived organoids; Personalized medicine; Tumoroids.