Organotypic models of patient-specific tumours are revolutionizing our understanding of cancer heterogeneity and its implications for personalized medicine. These advancements are, in part, attributed to the ability of organoid models to stably preserve genetic, proteomic, morphological and pharmacotypic features of the parent tumour in vitro, while also offering unprecedented genomic and environmental manipulation. Despite recent innovations in organoid protocols, current techniques for cancer organoid culture are inherently uncontrolled and irreproducible, owing to several non-standardized facets including cancer tissue sources and subsequent processing, medium formulations, and animal-derived three-dimensional matrices. Given the potential for cancer organoids to accurately recapitulate the intra- and intertumoral biological heterogeneity associated with patient-specific cancers, eliminating the undesirable technical variability accompanying cancer organoid culture is necessary to establish reproducible platforms that accelerate translatable insights into patient care. Here we describe the current challenges and recent multidisciplinary advancements and opportunities for standardizing next-generation cancer organoid systems.

患者特异性肿瘤的器官型模型正在彻底改变我们对癌症异质性及其对个性化医疗影响的理解。这些进步部分归功于类器官模型能够在体外稳定地保存亲本肿瘤的遗传、蛋白质组学、形态学和药型特征，同时还提供前所未有的基因组和环境操作。尽管最近在类器官方案方面有所创新，但由于癌症组织来源和后续处理、培养基配方和动物源性三维矩阵等几个非标准化方面，目前的癌症类器官培养技术本质上是不受控制和不可重复的。鉴于癌症类器官有可能准确地概括与患者特异性癌症相关的瘤内和瘤间生物异质性，消除伴随癌症类器官培养的不良技术变异性对于建立可重现的平台以加速对患者护理的可转化见解是必要的。在这里，我们描述了标准化下一代癌症类器官系统的当前挑战和最近的多学科进步和机遇。