Last week at the annual meeting of the Human Genome Organization (HUGO) in Australia, researchers from the University of Queensland in Brisbane presented new research about personalized mice “avatars”—mice grafted with a patient’s tumor tissue and then tested with various drugs to identify the most effective treatment against that tumor.
“Using a personalized cancer avatar makes it possible to try out different combinations and make some mistakes before going into the clinic,” Edison Liu, president of HUGO and head of the Jackson Laboratory at Bar Harbor in Maine told Nature. “It’s the direction in which a lot of research groups are going.”
In a proof-of-concept test of the idea, the Queensland team created a personalized mouse for a pancreatic cancer patient. They then tested the response of the patient’s tumor carried by the mouse to the drug mitomycin C, and found that it was effective. Unfortunately, the patient died before ...
