Establishment of a human tongue cancer organoid biobank enables early diagnosis, prognosis, and identification of therapeutic targets

Tongue cancer (TC) is the most frequent and a serious type of oral cancer with major clinical challenges such as lymph node metastasis and the appearance of chemotherapy resistant cells. Thus, development of diagnostic and therapeutic strategies to target these malignant cancer cells is urgently required. Here, we describe a novel and highly efficient method to generate human TC organoids, thereby creating a TC organoid biobank with primary and metastatic TC from 28 patients with diverse ages and cancer stages. These organoid lines can be expanded, passed, stored frozen for long periods, and they can reproduce original TC tissues in vitro and in xenograft models. The organoids showed different properties among patients with respect to the proliferation capacity and susceptibility to cisplatin, a commonly used chemotherapeutic agent in TC therapy. This suggests that TC organoids are useful for accurate risk grading and predicting the prognosis at early stages of TC, which is difficult to diagnose clinically. Thus, human TC organoids are useful for profiling TCs, which will lead to drug development against metastatic and chemotherapy-resistant TCs.