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Patient-derived xenograft: a developing tool for screening biomarkers and potential therapeutic targets for human esophageal cancers
Author(s) -
Tianfeng Lan,
Xue Xia,
Louisa Chard Dunmall,
Jinxin Miao,
Yaohe Wang
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
aging
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.473
H-Index - 90
ISSN - 1945-4589
DOI - 10.18632/aging.202934
Subject(s) - malignancy , medicine , esophageal cancer , cancer , personalized medicine , precision medicine , tumor microenvironment , cancer research , oncology , bioinformatics , pathology , biology
Esophageal cancer (EC) represents a human malignancy, diagnosed often at the advanced stage of cancer and resulting in high morbidity and mortality. The development of precision medicine allows for the identification of more personalized therapeutic strategies to improve cancer treatment. By implanting primary cancer tissues into immunodeficient mice for expansion, patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models largely maintain similar histological and genetic representations naturally found in patients' tumor cells. PDX models of EC (EC-PDX) provide fine platforms to investigate the tumor microenvironment, tumor genomic heterogeneity, and tumor response to chemoradiotherapy, which are necessary for new drug discovery to combat EC in addition to optimization of current therapeutic strategies for EC. In this review, we summarize the methods used for establishing EC-PDX models and investigate the utilities of EC-PDX in screening predictive biomarkers and potential therapeutic targets. The challenge of this promising research tool is also discussed.