New approach to dealing with drug resistant cancer

Scientists have been trying to decipher the secret of drug resistant cancer for a long time. But it is not possible in humans. However, scientists are now developing a new approach to tackle the problem. They propose to transplant cancer cells from humans into mice with defective immune system. This lets the scientists perform detailed analysis of the cancer cells. These transplanted cancers prove to be very good genomic replicas of the original at every level of analysis. The researchers found that the complex human cancer tissue in the mice looked similar to those in the people they originally belonged to. Matthew Ellis of Washington University in St Louis said, "Human testing is hugely expensive, and often the response rates for the patients on experimental drugs are low because the biology of each patient is not well defined. Panels of clinically and genomically annotated PDX can therefore be very valuable for studying drug action and developing predictive biomarkers. Extensive pre- and post-drug sampling can be conducted to study drug effects and drug resistance in a way that would be impossible in the clinical setting."