Mouse models in personalized cancer medicine

© 2017 Pan Stanford Publishing Pte. Ltd. From the identification of the first oncogenes and tumor suppressors to the more recent exploration of high-throughput sequencing data from studies like The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) (Chin et al., 2011; Cancer Genome Atlas Research Network, 2013), mouse models have helped cancer researchers to decipher and disentangle the driving molecular and cellular events that lead to cancer, but also to develop and test increasingly specialized drug-targeting strategies to improve their efficacy and reduce the associated side effects. Indeed, it is now clear that in addition to the genetic aberrations that underlie cell transformation, the microenvironment-formed by surrounding stromal cells and by immune components—plays a critical role in tumor expansion, 104cancer progression, and response to therapy. To date, despite significant advances in cellular culture techniques (including 3D cultures and co-cultures of tumor and stromal cells), this complexity is not justly recapitulated in vitro.