Patient-Derived Xenografts as a Model System for Radiation Research

The cancer literature is filled with promising preclinical studies demonstrating impressive efficacy for new therapeutics, yet translation of these approaches into clinical successes has been rare, indicating that current methods used to predict efficacy are suboptimal. The most likely reason for the limitation of these studies is the disconnect between preclinical models and cancers treated in the clinic. Specifically, most preclinical models are poor representations of human disease. Immortalized cancer cell lines that dominate the cancer literature may be, in a sense, “paper tigers” that have been selected by decades of culture to be artificially driven by highly targetable proteins.
Source: Seminars in Radiation Oncology - Category: Cancer & Oncology Authors: Source Type: research