A common technique used to generate tumor cells for cancer research could produce misleading and unrepresentative results, a new study shows. Because cancer cells taken directly from patients are scarce, researchers often culture these human-derived cells inside successive generations of mice. They then study such “passaged” cells to see how they behave and how the disease might respond to treatment.
The new findings highlight a serious limitation with this procedure: human cancer cells passaged in this way end up very different from the cells in the original tumor samples. Specifically, such serial transplantation leaves behind less than 1 percent of the cells present in the human disease. Studying such unrepresentative cell populations raises doubts about the extent to which the results can be applied back to people.
“Transplantation into mice is the number one preclinical model that people use. And that model itself induces some selection that people really hadn’t ...
