Researchers at UCLA Health have developed a new platform combining 3D bioprinting, advanced imaging, and AI to “better monitor how cancer responds to treatment.”

The technology “could help researchers identify promising cancer therapies more rapidly and provide a way to test treatments on a patient's own tumor cells, helping guide more personalized treatment decisions.” It uses cancer cells from patients to “create tiny, lab-grown replicas of tumors, known as organoids, and continuously tracks their response to different drugs. Artificial intelligence then analyzes the resulting data, helping scientists evaluate hundreds of potential therapies simultaneously to uncover patterns in drug responses that could inform treatment strategies for cancers with few effective options.”

Current systems still struggle to combine “biological accuracy with the speed, consistency, and scale needed for larger studies or clinical use.” The researchers developed a unified workflow to generate 3D tumor organoids and then monitored them continuously to track changes in biomass and growth dynamics.

The platform “successfully measured how tumor organoids responded to drug treatment over time, both in established cancer cell lines and in a patient-derived tumor sample. Advanced imaging allowed researchers to continuously monitor organoid growth changes in response to a range of drugs, while artificial intelligence helped analyze large amounts of data and track responses at the level of individual organoids.”