Pancreatic-Cancer Imageable Patient-Derived Orthotopic Xenografts (iPDOX)

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Individualized cancer treatment is an important goal, in particular, for pancreatic cancer, which is the most lethal human cancer. Novel transformative therapeutics are also urgently needed to cure this disease. Our laboratory pioneered the orthotopic growth of patient tumors, including colon cancer (1) and pancreatic cancer (2), in nude-mouse models where the tumors grow and metastasize as they did in the patient. Although there is presently much interest in growth of patient tumors in immunodeficient mouse models to individualize therapy and new names for these models have been coined, such as tumorgraft and xenopatients , the current models are still subcutaneous ectopic xenografts in various types of immunodeficient mice. Such ectopic models do not metastasize and therefore do not sufficiently represent the patient. The present application, takes advantages of the patient-like orthotopic models our laboratory pioneered (1-6) as well as the in vivo imaging techn