Tackling drug-resistant cancers using a genome-forward approach (eg mice and men/women)

medical news

(using breast cancer cells as the example)

"....In other words, the complex human tumor tissues in the mice looked very much like those in the people they originally came from. While some new mutations did arise after transplantation, those genetic changes rarely had functional significance.
The researchers were surprised to discover that the original and PDX cancers were similar at the cellular level as well. Cancer cells carrying mutations that were relatively rare in the patient were also maintained at lower frequencies in the mice. Likewise, more dominant clones in the original tumor tended to stay dominant in the mice. This suggests that the frequency of genetically distinct tumor cells is in an equilibrium that survives transplantation into mice for reasons that aren't yet clear....