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Review|Volume 13, Issue 8|pp 12273—12293

Patient-derived xenograft: a developing tool for screening biomarkers and potential therapeutic targets for human esophageal cancers

Tianfeng Lan1, Xia Xue1,2, Louisa Chard Dunmall3, Jinxin Miao1,4, Yaohe Wang1,3
  • 1Sino-British Research Center for Molecular Oncology, National Center for the International Research in Cell and Gene Therapy, School of Basic Sciences, Academy of Medical Sciences, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, Henan, P.R. China
  • 2The Academy of Medical Science, Precision Medicine Center of the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou University, Henan, P.R. China
  • 3Centre for Cancer Biomarkers and Biotherapeuitcs, Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK
  • 4Academy of Chinese Medicine Science, Henan University of Chinese Medicine, Zhengzhou, Henan, P.R. China
Received: September 4, 2020Accepted: March 23, 2021Published: April 26, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202934

Copyright: © 2021 Lan et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

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.