Glioblastoma in a 15-year-old boyWIKIMEDIA, CHRISTARAS AIn recent years, researchers have been transplanting tumors from patients, called patient-derived xenografts (PDXs), into mice to study the cancers and their responses to drugs. A study published yesterday (October 9) in Nature Genetics raises questions about how well these models represent human cancers. The study finds that when transplanted into mice, the cancers undergo different genomic changes than they do in human hosts.
“The assumption is that what grows out in the PDX is reflective of the bulk of the tumor in the patient,” study author and cancer geneticist Todd Golub, of both the Broad Institute, at MIT, and Harvard, tells Nature News. “But there’s quite dramatic resculpting of the tumor genome.”
Previous research had suggested that PDXs were fairly good representatives of human cancers, and researchers have invested heavily in PDX development. Both in the U.S. and Europe researchers have developed PDX libraries and repositories.
To take a closer look at how well PDXs recapitulate human cancers, researchers relied on publicly available data about changes in gene copy number (in some cases extrapolated from gene expression data) in PDXs. They compared these data with equivalent data about ...
