Alex Moreau, PhD, from Champions Oncology answers key questions about Drug Development Strategies
1) Do you have patient response correlating to the PDX?
Yes. We demonstrated that PDX models effectively capture responses to oncology therapy in a heterogeneous cohort of patients with solid tumors across multiple indications. This landmark analysis was published in Annals of Oncology in 2017 (Izumchenko et al.). We compared whole-exome sequencing of 237 PDX models to equivalent information in The Cancer Genome Atlas database, revealing that TumorGrafts® faithfully conserve genetic patterns of the primary tumors. We next screened PDXs established for 92 patients with various solid cancers against the same 129 treatments that were administered clinically and correlated patient outcomes with the responses in corresponding models. Our analysis demonstrates that PDXs accurately replicate patients’ clinical outcomes in over 85% of the cases tested (nearly 100% in some cancer types), even as patients undergo several additional cycles of therapy over time, indicating the capacity of these models to correctly guide an oncologist to treatments that are most likely to be of clinical benefit.