Clonal evolution of long-term expanding head and neck cancer organoid: Impact on treatment response for personalized therapeutic screening

Objectives: In biobanking based on patient-derived organoids (PDO), the genetic stability of organoid lines is critical for the clinical relevance of PDO with parental tumors. However, data on mutational heterogeneity and clonal evolution of PDO and their effects on treatment response are insufficient.Methods: To investigate whether head and neck cancer organoids (HNCOs) could maintain the genetic characteristics of their original tumors and elucidate the clonal evolution process during a long-term passage, we performed targeted sequencing, covering 377 cancer-related genes and adopted a sub-clonal fraction model. To explore therapeutic response variability between an early and late passage (>passage 6), we generated dose-response curves for drugs and radiation using two HNCO lines.Results: Using 3D ex vivo organoid culture protocol, we successfully established 27 HNCOs from 39 patients with an overall success rate of 70% (27/39). Their mutational profiles were highly concordant, with three of the HNCOs analyzed showing greater than 70% concordance. Only one HNCO displayed less than 50% concordance. However, many of these organoid lines displayed clonal evolution during serial passaging, although major cancer driver genes and VAF distributions were shared between early and later passages. We also found that all late passages of HNCOs tended to be more sensitive to radiation than early passages, similar to drug response results.Conclusions: We report the establishment of HNCO lines derived from 27 patients and demonstrate their genetic concordance with corresponding parental tumors. Furthermore, we show serial changes in mutational profiles of HNCO along with long passage culture and the impact of these clonal evolutions on response to radiotherapy.