Patient-Derived Xenografts and Organoids Recapitulate Castration-Resistant Prostate Cancer with Sustained Androgen Receptor Signaling

Abstract

Castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) remains an incurable and lethal malignancy. The development of new CRPC treatment strategies is strongly impeded by the scarcity of representative, scalable and transferable preclinical models of advanced, androgen receptor (AR)-driven CRPC. Here, we present contemporary patient-derived xenografts (PDXs) and matching PDX-derived organoids (PDXOs) from CRPC patients who had undergone multiple lines of treatment. These models were comprehensively profiled at the morphologic, genomic (n = 8) and transcriptomic levels (n = 81). All are high-grade adenocarcinomas that exhibit copy number alterations and transcriptomic features representative of CRPC patient cohorts. We identified losses of PTEN and RB1, MYC amplifications, as well as genomic alterations in TP53 and in members of clinically actionable pathways such as AR, PI3K and DNA repair pathways. Importantly, the clinically observed continued reliance of CRPC tumors on AR signaling is preserved across the entire set of models, with AR amplification identified in four PDXs. We demonstrate that PDXs and PDXOs faithfully reflect donor tumors and mimic matching patient drug responses. In particular, our models predicted patient responses to subsequent treatments and captured sensitivities to previously received therapies. Collectively, these PDX-PDXO pairs constitute a reliable new resource for in-depth studies of treatment-induced, AR-driven resistance mechanisms. Moreover, PDXOs can be leveraged for large-scale tumor-specific drug response profiling critical for accelerating therapeutic advances in CRPC.