Research progress of patient-derived xenografts in precision cancer medicine / 中国比较医学杂志

ABSTRACT

Cancer is a group of heterogeneous disease caused by diverse genomic alterations in oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes .Despite recent advances in high-throughput sequencing technologies and development of targeted therapies, novel cancer drug development is limited due to the high attrition rate from clinical studies .Patient-derived xenografts ( PDX) models are generated by implanting sectioned patient tumor fragments into immunodeficient mice .PDX models retain many of the key characteristics of patients ' tumors including histology , genomic signature , cellular heterogeneity , and drug responsiveness .These models cannot only serve as a platform for co-clinical trials by enabling the integration of clinical data , genomic profiles , and drug responsiveness data to determine precisely targeted therapies , but also be applied to the development of biomarkers for drug responsiveness and personalized drug selection .This review summarizes our current knowledge of this field , including methodologic aspects , applications in drug development , challenges and limitations , and utilization for precision cancer medicine .