The Institute for Precision Medicine hosted the NCI-BCRF-Komen workshop on “Patient-Derived Breast Cancer Organoids: Challenges & Opportunities” on May 21-22, 2025 at The Assembly in Pittsburgh, PA.

The meeting was co-organized by myself, Sandra Demaria, Ariella Hanker, and Senthil Muthuswamy.

We brought together 45 investigators to discuss the state-of-the-art in PDO research and gaps that present barriers to progress.

The lively event raised several excellent points about how PDOs are credentialed and used in research. In particular, their use in predicting patient response to therapy (e.g., co-clinical trials) was a hotly discussed topic.

The National Institutes of Health recently promoted organoid models to reduce the reliance on animal models, and we hope that these novel alternative metholodologies will provide new avenues for precision medicine.

We thank The Breast Cancer Research Foundation and Susan G. Komen for sponsoring the workshop and advocates Bob Riter and Jamie LaScala who participated in a panel discussion on obtaining tissue for research.

Outcomes and deliverables of the workshop will be a white paper on best practices in breast cancer PDO research and hopefully a new network that can share PDO and data and accelerate this research.

If you are interested in participating in the Breast Organoid Working Group (BOWG) contact Dr. Adrian Lee.