Preclinical Organotypic Models for the Assessment of Novel Cancer Therapeutics and Treatment.

Preclinical Organotypic Models for the Assessment of Novel Cancer Therapeutics and Treatment. Curr Top Microbiol Immunol. 2019 Mar 12;: Authors: Ward C, Meehan J, Gray M, Kunkler IH, Langdon SP, Murray A, Argyle D Abstract The immense costs in both financial terms and preclinical research effort that occur in the development of anticancer drugs are unfortunately not matched by a substantial increase in improved clinical therapies due to the high rate of failure during clinical trials. This may be due to issues with toxicity or lack of clinical effectiveness when the drug is evaluated in patients. Currently, much cancer research is driven by the need to develop therapies that can exploit cancer cell adaptations to conditions in the tumor microenvironment such as acidosis and hypoxia, the requirement for more-specific, targeted treatments, or the exploitation of 'precision medicine' that can target known genomic changes in patient DNA. The high attrition rate for novel anticancer therapies suggests that the preclinical methods used in screening anticancer drugs need improvement. This chapter considers the advantages and disadvantages of 3D organotypic models in both cancer research and cancer drug screening, particularly in the areas of targeted drugs and the exploitation of genomic changes that can be used for therapeutic advantage in precision medicine. PMID: 30859401 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology - Category: Microbiology Tags: Curr Top Microbiol Immunol Source Type: research