AccScience Publishing / OR / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/or.8571
ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE

Patient-derived tumor organoids-guided adjuvant chemotherapy after surgical resection of intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma: A multicenter and retrospective study

Shichao Zhang1† Hao Shen2,3† Wenxin Wei1† Lv Jin1 Zhihao Xie1,2 Jinhuan Liu4 Wei Zhai2 Zhilin Sha5 Tao Yuan3 Zhishi Yang1 Yong Xia1,2 Chen Liu5 Jun Li3 Timothy M Pawlik6 Feng Shen1,2* Kui Wang1,2*
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1 Department of Hepatic Surgery, Eastern Hepatobiliary Surgery Hospital and National Center for Liver Cancer, Naval Medical University, Shanghai, China
2 Clinical Research Institute, Eastern Hepatobiliary Surgery Hospital and National Center for Liver Cancer, Naval Medical University, Shanghai, China
3 Department of General Surgery, Shanghai Tenth People’s Hospital, Tongji University, Shanghai, China
4 Department of Neurosurgery, The First Clinical Medical College, Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou, Zhejiang, China
5 Department of Biliary Tract Surgery, Eastern Hepatobiliary Surgery Hospital and National Center for Liver Cancer, Naval Medical University, Shanghai, China
6 Department of Surgery, The Ohio State University, Wexner Medical Center, Columbus, Ohio, USA
†These authors contributed equally to this work.
Received: 17 January 2025 | Revised: 25 February 2025 | Accepted: 7 March 2025 | Published online: 20 March 2025
© 2025 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution -Noncommercial 4.0 International License (CC-by the license) ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )
Abstract

This multicenter retrospective study investigated the clinical utility of patient-derived tumor organoids (PDOs) in guiding adjuvant chemotherapy for intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (ICC) patients. A total of 82 ICC patients at the Shanghai Eastern Hepatobiliary Surgery Hospital and the Shanghai Tenth People’s Hospital between 2021 and 2022 were included in the study. All of these patients underwent surgical resection and were pathologically confirmed to have high-risk factors for recurrence. Therefore, they received adjuvant chemotherapy post-surgery. Sixty-one PDOs were successfully established from resected tumor tissues and tested against four common regimens: Gemcitabine + cisplatin, gemcitabine + oxaliplatin, capecitabine, and S-1. A novel fluorescence-based method was developed for drug sensitivity testing, showing significant concordance with conventional half-maximal inhibitory concentration quantification. Patients were stratified into matched (n=26) and unmatched (n=35) groups based on alignment between PDOs-based drug sensitivity results and actual chemotherapy received. The matched group demonstrated significantly improved recurrence-free survival (RFS) (hazard ratio = 2.52, p=0.007), with 63% versus 17% experiencing recurrence events. Through eXtreme Gradient Boosting machine learning and Cox regression analyses, we identified PDOs-based drug sensitivity, tumor multiplicity, and vascular invasion as key predictors of 2-year recurrence. A clinical nomogram incorporating these factors showed that patients with matched PDO-guided therapy had 46% 12-month RFS probability versus 28% in unmatched cases. This study provides a clinically translatable platform to guide adjuvant chemotherapy decisions and predict the prognosis of ICC patients with a high recurrence risk after surgery.

Graphical abstract
Keywords
Intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma
Patient-derived tumor organoids
Drug sensitivity testing
Recurrence-free survival
Adjuvant therapy
Funding
This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (82403243 to Hao Shen), Clinical Research Projects of Shanghai Shenkang Hospital Development Center (SHDC2024CRI062 to Wenxin Wei), and the Tengfei Project of Third Affiliated Hospital of Naval Medical University (TF2024XSJJ004 to Wenxin Wei) the Clinical Research Cultivation.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
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