Why search for the best possible cancer model when you can build one?
Advances in targeted cancer therapies have made preclinical drug development a highly customized endeavor. To gain the greatest insight from IND-enabling studies, cancer researchers need clinically relevant models that can stand in as true proxies for human disease and reflect a therapy’s intended purpose. Whether you’re investigating drug resistance to standard-of-care, testing the effects of adjuvant radiotherapy, or honing in on predictive biomarkers, cancer models customized for your purpose can more accurately inform go/no-go development decisions… and spare you the frustration of lengthy model searches.
Accounting for Clinical Scenarios
Certis Oncology develops custom in vitro and in vivo models to address a myriad of clinical scenarios, including radiotherapy, a commonly used cancer treatment worldwide.
Modeling Metastasis, Resistance Mechanisms and More
Translational oncology research success is largely dependent upon selecting—or sometimes custom-developing—the most appropriate preclinical models to assess clinical response to targeted cancer therapies. Both in vitro and in vivo test systems can be customized to mimic the full spectrum of clinical scenarios, including:
- Prior treatment—preclinical cancer models pretreated with standard-of-care or potential combination therapies
- Radiotherapy—whole body or focal radiation, often dosed in combination with an investigational drug or immuno-therapy.
- Acquired cancer drug resistance—including customized dosing regimens to study bypass track and other clinically relevant mechanisms of resistance.
- Metastases— models of experimental metastasis developed with advanced orthotopic patient-derived xenografts and assessed with bioluminescence imaging to evaluate the ability of tumor cells to arrest, extravasate, and grow in various organs following intravascular injection.
- Stacking anti-cancer therapies – combination dosing strategies.
- Immune response—PBMC or CD34 humanized models
Custom Assay Development
To closely mimic experimental metastasis from the breast to the brain seen in the clinic, a Certis in vivo scientist surgically implants a HER2+ PDX-derived breast cancer cell line stereotactically in the brain. Read more about our deep expertise in orthotopic intracranial models.
Focal and Whole Body Radiation
About 60% of cancer patients in the developed world receive radiotherapy as part of their treatment. Focal and whole body radiation technology affords researchers the ability to develop more disease-relevant models that more closely mimic clinical scenarios.1 By modeling adjuvant radiotherapy, we can elucidate the effects of radiation on drug response. Precision radiation also can be employed in the laboratory to understand the effects of radiosensitizers and radioprotectors, and to develop predictive biomarkers of radiation sensitivity.
Using Targeted Radiation Technology
The Precision X-Rad 320 radiator sports a homogeneous beam that delivers a precise radiation dose to either cell cultures or mouse models to prepare them for pharmacology.
Beyond a One-Size-Fits-All Approach:
Advanced Cancer Models
Advanced antineoplastics, such as antistromal therapies2, require advanced cancer models that take into account the tumor microenvironment. Developing the most clinically relevant, custom model begins with sourcing the most relevant tumor specimen from the BarneyOI Cancer Model Database®. The Certis tumor bank covers a wide range of cancer types and disease states, including treatment-naïve,pretreated, as well as primary and metastatic tumors. Reduce variability between in vitro and in vivo studies by pairing patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models with their matching PDX-derived 3D cell cultures.
Modeling Clinical Relevance with Orthotopic PDX
Orthotopic patient-derived xenograft models not only mirror human tumor biology better than legacy models, they can also accurately predict drug response, drug resistance, and metastatic proliferation.3456 Certis scientists have spent years perfecting the art of orthotopic engraftment, using novel surgical techniques and sophisticated animal husbandry protocols to optimize cohort viability.