In a quest to find a better way to target melanoma treatment, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and colleagues tested how four types of mouse models predict the delivery of the anticancer drug carboplatin to melanoma tumors in patients. The study was published online in the journal The Oncologist.
A release from the university quotes co-author Bill Zamboni, PharmD and PhD as saying, “Because carboplatin is widely used, we have good data on how the drug works pharmacokinetically in humans. For the first time, we were able to compare these various laboratory techniques used in countless labs and the pharmaceutical industry to evaluate how carboplatin was delivered to the tumor and compare it to actual human data. None of these laboratory models are perfect, but the genetically engineered model is the best in terms of predicting the amount of drug that is delivered to the tumor in human patients.”
The release notes that traditional anticancer drug development has relied on xenografts, or the transplanting of human cancer cell lines in immune-compromised mice, but the usefulness of this practice has recently been questioned. This study is the first direct, comprehensive comparison of the efficacy of xenograft models, genetically engineered mouse models (GEMMs), and two types of orthotopic syngeneic transplants (OSTs), where tumor cells are transplanted to the appropriate part of the body.
