Abstract 3541: Tumoroid-based screening platform to test focal, chemo- and combination therapy for retinoblastoma
Authors: Sinenko Irina , Kuttler Fabien , Simeonov Valentin , Moulin Alexandre , Stathopoulos Christina , Turcatti Gerardo , Berger Adeline , Munier Francis , Dyson Paul 
Published: April 2023

Current treatments for retinoblastoma, the most common intraocular malignancy, rely on a limited number of drugs repurposed from other pediatric cancer therapies. Drug toxicity and relapse of the disease necessitate new therapeutic strategies. The implementation of drug candidates in the clinic is usually followed by in vitro validation, which requires accurate and clinically relevant in vitro models. We report here a robust 3D tumoroid-based platform, for testing various clinical protocols, e.g. therapeutic agents following a single or repeated exposure, alone or in combination with focal therapy (thermotherapy). The platform, generated from the Y79 retinoblastoma cell line, consists of matrix-embedded tumoroids, which retain the key features of the disease and allow prolonged culture time. Following the optimization of growth conditions, the effect of single and repeated exposure to chemotherapeutic agents has been measured by high-throughput automated fluorescence imaging followed by quantification. The clinical conditions of chemothermotherapy have been recapitulated with a setup consisting of: an infrared diode laser (810 nm, 0.3 W) that heats the tumoroids in the presence of indocyanine green (50 µg/mL); a thermal camera to enable real-time temperature measurement; and an environment-controlled inverted microscope to ensure physiological conditions and precise focusing of the laser. Melphalan and carboplatin, two drugs currently used to treat retinoblastoma in clinical protocols of chemotherapy and chemothermotherapy respectively, have been applied to validate the system.Tumoroid viability and size progressively decreased over 4 weeks of repeated drug exposure with melphalan, reflecting the response of retinoblastoma in advanced clinical cases. Carboplatin treatment showed an activity enhancement in the tumoroid model similar to that observed in the clinic, when combined with focal therapy, demonstrating that the platform system closely recapitulates the clinical conditions. Inversely, the thermotherapy experimental protocol designed for 2D in vitro cell culture and commonly used to date, i.e. an incubation temperature increased to 42 °C for 1 h, did not show an improvement of the carboplatin cytotoxicity, confirming that our laser-based thermotherapy protocol provides a more accurate and clinically relevant drug response.

Such an approach, combining physiologically relevant in vitro cancer models and investigation of drugs in well-established treatment modalities, can significantly reduce the number of new drug candidates that give false-positives or overestimated efficacies when evaluated in relevant in vivo models. It is expected that the platform will contribute to the implementation of new therapeutic strategies to treat retinoblastoma, and could also be adapted to other diseases for which repeated drug exposure and/or chemothermotherapy is relevant.

Citation Format: Irina Sinenko, Fabien Kuttler, Valentin Simeonov, Alexandre Moulin, Christina Stathopoulos, Gerardo Turcatti, Adeline Berger, Francis Munier, Paul Dyson. Tumoroid-based screening platform to test focal, chemo- and combination therapy for retinoblastoma. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2023; Part 1 (Regular and Invited Abstracts); 2023 Apr 14-19; Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2023;83(7_Suppl):Abstract nr 3541.