We’re getting in touch today with an announcement regarding the addition of the Liver Orthotopic Xenograft mouse model to our model line-up – a cancer model that also allows the evaluation of the tumor microenvironment.

The number of deaths from cancer continues to rise as medical advances extend life spans.

Therefore, there is a high requirement for the development of therapeutic drugs for various cancers, and many clinical trials are being carried out. However, in contrast to the success of pre-clinical trials, there are significant barriers to success in clinical trials. One of the reasons for this may be the influence of the use of subcutaneous Xenograft models.

Xenograft models are used in cancer research to evaluate the efficacy of a cell line against a target tumor in a simple way.

However, the correlation between the results of preclinical study using subcutaneous Xenograft models and clinical studies has been reported to be low (Johnson et al., Br. J. Cancer., 2001).

Therefore, Orthotopic Xenograft models are of interest, as they allow the assessment of the environment surrounding the tumor.

The importance of the tumor microenvironment has been previously reported (Min et al., Curr. Opin. Genet. Dev., 2008), and the interaction between tumor cells and tissue-specific stromal cells has been reported to influence tumor growth, differentiation and drug sensitivity (Douglas et al., Nat Med. 2010).

The Orthotopic Xenograft model is a relatively cost-effective way to study the effects of the tumor microenvironment and is expected to provide more informative results than the subcutaneous Xenograft model. If you are interested in liver cancer, why not use our Orthotopic Xenograft model first to generate some preliminary data?