Ex vivo culture of human prostate tissue and drug development

Although an array of new therapeutics exist for prostate cancer, the development of agents that can improve outcomes for men with prostate cancer remains inefficient, costly, and frustratingly slow. A major impediment to the clinical translation of research findings is the lack of preclinical models that can accurately predict the clinical efficacy of new drugs and, therefore, enable the selection of agents that are most suitable for clinical trials. An approach that is gaining popularity in the prostate cancer community is ex vivo culture of primary human tissues, which retains the native tissue architecture, hormone responsiveness, and cell-to-cell signalling of the tumour microenvironment in a dynamic and manipulable state. Ex vivo culture systems recapitulate the structural complexity and heterogeneity of human prostate cancers in a laboratory setting, making them an important adjunct to current cell-line-based and animal-based models. When incorporated into preclinical studies, ex vivo cultured tissues enable robust quantitative evaluation of clinically relevant end points representing drug efficacy, investigation of therapy resistance, and biomarker discovery. By providing new clinically relevant insights into prostate carcinogenesis, it is likely that ex vivo culture will enhance drug development programmes and improve the translational 'hit rate' for prostate cancer research.