Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the second leading cause of cancer death globally. Recent researchers have found that human gut bacteria can either promote or suppress cancer in the gut. This finding led us to consider what if the gut bacteria can change the effectiveness of cancer management in clinics such as cancer immunotherapy. Although this idea has suggested a lot of attention and potential, unfortunately, there have been no reliable experimental models to build a patient-specific CRC model in the laboratory. For instance, animal CRC models have been used for a while, they cannot reflect individual patient’s genetic backgrounds, gut bacteria, and anti-cancer effect in real-time. Here, we s...

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Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the second leading cause of cancer death globally. Recent researchers have found that human gut bacteria can either promote or suppress cancer in the gut. This finding led us to consider what if the gut bacteria can change the effectiveness of cancer management in clinics such as cancer immunotherapy. Although this idea has suggested a lot of attention and potential, unfortunately, there have been no reliable experimental models to build a patient-specific CRC model in the laboratory. For instance, animal CRC models have been used for a while, they cannot reflect individual patient’s genetic backgrounds, gut bacteria, and anti-cancer effect in real-time. Here, we suggest a new CRC model that can hold patient’s colon cells, gut bacteria, and immune cells in a thumb-size microdevice, we call it a “CRC Chip”. In collaboration with physicians, we will build “patient’s avatar” chips that show similar shape and function of human CRC, by which we can manipulate a complex disease feature in a simplified version of a CRC model. We will grow different types of gut bacteria, either isolated single species or fecal bacteria isolated from stool samples to see if these bacterial stimulations can change the cell surface receptors pertinent to the response to clinical immunotherapy treatment. We will apply microscopy, biochemical assays, and genetic sequencing to understand if bacterial co-culture can help to enhance the effect of immunotherapy by adding patient-matched activated immune cells (T lymphocytes). Our approach will elucidate if a simple microbial regimen such as a probiotic yogurt diet may help to significantly improve the limitation of current cancer immunotherapy in CRC. We envision that the CRC Chip will provide significant impacts on advanced immunotherapy as a substitution of current models and will be widely employed for new CRC drug development.

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