“Organoids-on-a-Chip Model: a Human Avatar for Patient-Specific Tumor Microenvironment Modeling and Immunotherapy Testing”

Lunan Liu, a Ph.D. candidate at New York University, received IFER funding from 2024-2025 for his project, “Organoids-on-a-Chip Model: a Human Avatar for Patient-Specific Tumor Microenvironment Modeling and Immunotherapy Testing.” Lunan is developing a human organ-on-a-chip/organoid system to investigate pancreatic cancer, a highly malignant cancer that responds poorly to drugs and immunotherapies. Lunan will generate chip models that include stromal, immune and blood vessel components, in addition to organoids derived from the cells of different pancreatic cancer patients to better understand how and why the cancer is difficult to treat with immunotherapies, and why different patients have different responses to treatments. In addition to being more human-relevant, the model can provide more data and do so more quickly than animal models, while better representing the diversity of the human population than inbred mouse models typically used to study the condition.