MINI REVIEW article
Front. Lab Chip Technol.
Sec. Organ on a Chip
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frlct.2025.1663420
This article is part of the Research TopicExploring Organogenesis and Disease Models with Organoids and Organ-on-a-Chip TechnologiesView all articles
Advancements and Challenges in Culturing Patient-Derived Cancer Cells for Personalized Therapeutics
Provisionally accepted
- 1City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong, SAR China
- 2National University of Singapore Department of Biomedical Engineering, Singapore, Singapore
- 3Department of Bioengineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore
- 4National University of Singapore Mechanobiology Institute, Singapore, Singapore
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Patient-derived cancer cells (PDCCs) have emerged as a key strategy for advancing personalized cancer treatment. Unlike traditional cancer cell lines, PDCCs retain the genetic and phenotypic characteristics of the patient's original tumor and can more accurately reflect tumor biology. This review explores recent advances in methods for culturing PDCCs, highlighting the role of these models in drug discovery and high-throughput screening of personalized therapeutic options. By establishing living models directly from patient tumors, PDCCs can more faithfully recapitulate tumor heterogeneity and microenvironmental features than traditional cell lines. These cultures bridge laboratory research and clinical reality, allowing functional testing of patients' cancer cells. Despite the promise of PDCCs, their culture remains fraught with challenges, including the extremely low number of cancer cells that can be obtained, difficulty maintaining tumor heterogeneity, low culture initiation success rates, and ethical considerations for using patient tissues. In addition, controversy remains regarding the reproducibility of results between different laboratories and patient samples. By examining the field's current state, this review identifies gaps in the application of PDCCs, such as limited modeling capabilities for specific tumor types and the lack of comprehensive, scalable protocols for broad clinical use. This article discusses future directions, including integration with advanced microengineering and AI-driven analysis, which have the potential to overcome existing limitations and optimize PDCCs-based therapeutic strategies. PDCCs are expected to transform the future of cancer treatment as they ultimately provide more accurate drug testing and personalized medicine models.
Keywords: Patient-Derived Cancer Cells (PDCCs), personalized medicine, cancer therapeutics, Drug Discovery, 3D cell culture, tumor heterogeneity, High-Throughput Screening, Organoids
Received: 10 Jul 2025; Accepted: 18 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Fu, Khoo and Lim. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Chwee Teck Lim, Department of Bioengineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 117576, Singapore
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.