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Nature Medicine 10, 579 - 580 (2004)
doi:10.1038/nm0604-579
TORward AKTually useful mouse models
Ingo K Mellinghoff1 & Charles L Sawyers1
- Ingo K. Mellinghoff is in the Departments of Medicine and Molecular and Medical Pharmacology, and Charles L. Sawyers is in the Departments of Medicine, Molecular and Medical Pharmacology and Urology, the Molecular Biology Institute, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, all at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095-1678, USA. e-mail: csawyers@mednet.ucla.edu
Abstract
Cancer treatment is evolving from the empirical administration of chemotherapeutics to the precise deployment of molecularly targeted agents. This new paradigm depends on the ability to monitor therapy using molecular signatures of target inhibition in tumor tissue. Genetically engineered mice may prove useful for deriving such signatures, as shown for an analog of the anticancer drug rapamycin (pages 594–601).
For over half a century, the preclinical evaluation of cancer therapeutics has relied on cancer cell lines and patient tumor samples implanted into immunodeficient mice. Though these cancer models provide a convenient and unlimited source of human cancer cells in which to compare the potency of various chemotherapeutics, their genetic complexity and variability has limited their utility for predicting outcome in patient trials.
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