Better models could improve liver cancer treatment

Immunotherapies, such as cell therapies, could effectively treat liver cancer. However, to make these treatment options more viable, researchers must first improve in vitro models used to study them.

Lam et al. summarize recent 2D and 3D in vitro liver cancer models. They describe the characteristics of the microenvironment for hepatocellular carcinoma, the most common form of liver cancer.

The authors explain how the next generation of in vitro models will replicate the liver tumor microenvironment better, thus improving the study of immunotherapy strategies currently being developed and tested. Most preclinical in vitro methods used to assess the efficacy of cell therapies are the same used to test chemotherapies, but these two types of therapies have completely different mechanisms of operation.

“By highlighting the liver tumor microenvironment and the unique obstacles it presents to cell therapies and the new and more physiologically relevant preclinical models that have been developed, we hope that readers realize that different experimental models should be used when studying cell therapies,” said author Maxine Lam.

The authors hope researchers developing cell therapies could use the review to understand how characteristics of the liver tumor microenvironment affect a therapy strategy’s success. This could allow them to design a model that better simulates a particular characteristic of the microenvironment, enhancing preclinical research of cell therapies.

“Hopefully, readers will be inspired by some of the experimental models presented here and adopt them, especially when studying the effect of the liver tumor microenvironment on immunotherapies such as adoptive cell therapies,” Lam said.

Source: “In vitro 3D liver tumor microenvironment models for immune cell therapy optimization,” by Maxine Lam, Jose Antonio Reales-Calderon, Jin Rong Ow, Giulia Adriani, and Andrea Pavesi, APL Bioengineering (2021). The article can be accessed at https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/5.0057773 .

This paper is part of the Bioengineering of the Liver collection. Learn more here: https://aip.scitation.org/toc/apb/collection/10.1063/apb.2021.BOL2021.issue-1