Clearity Foundation - tumor blueprinting

Tethys41

This foundation tests ovarian cancer tumors to determine the best course of treatment for that specific tumor. I don't know how this differs from the tumor assay many doctors run, but I believe it is more specific than those tests.
http://www.clearityfoundation.org/clearity-overview.aspx
I understand that the foundation covers the costs of the test.

Lisa13Q

I did look into this...
Here's what I found out....although it's intriguing research, there has been no research to indicate that cancer in the body responds to chemo in any similar way to how it does as a separate entity in the petrie dish......I looked into this in great depth....Also, in order to do the test, the cells have to be less than a year old...

kikz

Lisa13Q said:

I did look into this...
Here's what I found out....although it's intriguing research, there has been no research to indicate that cancer in the body responds to chemo in any similar way to how it does as a separate entity in the petrie dish......I looked into this in great depth....Also, in order to do the test, the cells have to be less than a year old...

Thanks for the info, Lisa
I just read about this research in Oprah magazine while I was at Kaiser. Maybe it will turn out to be something when more research is done. We can only hope.

Karen

gdpawel

kikz said:

Thanks for the info, Lisa
I just read about this research in Oprah magazine while I was at Kaiser. Maybe it will turn out to be something when more research is done. We can only hope.

Karen

Gene Expression and Amplification Studies
Clinical interpretation of PCR results may be challenging. PCR may be useful when culture is difficult due to the low numbers of the organisms, for lengthly culture requirements, or when there is difficulty in collecting an appropriate sample. Like Lisa stated though, don't know if the results would be indicative of what would happen inside the human body.

They ususally proliferate (grow) cancer cells from a small sample and subject those cells to chemo. Cells 'grown' in the lab will not behave the same way as the actual cancer cells do in your body's own environment.

Because they test on subcultured cells (as opposed to fresh tumor cultures) and test the cells in monolayers (as opposed to three dimensional cell clusters), the cell grown in the lab will not behave the same way as the actual cancer cells do in your body's own environment.

All of the work in the past twenty years in the cell culture field has been carried out largely on three dimensional (3D) clusters of cells (not monolayers). Work is done exclusively with three dimensional, floating, tumor spheroids. Even researchers at Johns Hopkins and Washington University in St. Louis have discovered that 3D analysis is more accurate.

With paraffin-embedded specimens, IHC testing examines dead tissue. One gets more accurate information when using intact RNA isolated from "fresh" tissue than from using degraded RNA, which is present in paraffin-fixed tissue.

That is examining "dead" tissue that is preserved in paraffin or formalin. How is that going to be predictive to the behavior of living cells in spontaneously formed colonies or microsphers (microclusters)?

Can it describe the complex behavior of living cancer cells in response to the injury they receive from different forms of chemotherapy? There is a big difference between "living" and "dead" tissue.

The cell-block technique is useful for special stains and immunohistochemistry and can give morphological (structural) details by preserving (in paraffin wax) the architectural patterns.

However, investigators can only measure those analytes (substance or chemical constituent) in paraffin wax that they know to measure. If you are not aware of and capable of measuring a biologically relevant event, you cannot seek to detect it.

Cell-blocks are paraffin-embedded, and parffin-embedded tissue can change over time. These proliferating populations of cells are biologically distinct in their behavior from "fresh" live cells that comprise human tumors.

Some molecular tests do utilize living cells, but generally of individual cancer cells in suspension, sometimes derived from tumors and sometimes derived from circulating tumor cells.

This was tried with the human clonogenic assay, which had been discredited long ago. Again, traditionally, in-vitro (in lab) "cell-lines" have been studied in 2 dimensions (2D) which has inherent limitations in applicability to real life 3D in-vivo (in body) states.

Real-life cancers grow as a complex organism that includes both malignant and non-malignant components. It may include fibrous tissue, mesothelial cells, fibroblasts, endothelial cells, etc.

In order to exhibit its most characteristic behavior patterns, a cancer cell needs to be surrounded by a colony of other cells, both normal and malignant.

Human tumors represent micro-ecosystems composed of transformed cells, stroma, fibroblasts, vascular elements, extra-cellular protein matrices and inflammatory elements.

The behavior of human cancers and their reponse to therapy reflect the complex interplay between humoral, vascular, adhesion and cytokine-mediated events acting in concert.

Tumors are very complex organisms. Ignoring this complexity, most studies of human cancer in culture have focused upon individual tumor cells that have been removed from their complex microenvironoment.

Greg