Related Experiment Video
Updated: Nov 20, 2025
Pre-Conditioning the Airways of Mice with Bleomycin Increases the Efficiency of Orthotopic Lung Cancer Cell Engraftment
Published on: June 28, 2018
Future perspectives from lung cancer pre-clinical models: new treatments are coming?
Francesca Bersani1, Deborah Morena2,3, Francesca Picca2,3
1Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA.
Abstract:
Lung cancer currently stands out as both the most common and the most lethal type of cancer, the latter feature being partly explained by the fact that the majority of lung cancer patients already display advanced disease at the time of diagnosis. In recent years, the development of specific tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKI) for the therapeutic benefit of patients harboring certain molecular aberrations and the introduction of prospective molecular profiling in the clinical practice have revolutionized the treatment of advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). However, the identification of the best strategies to enhance treatment effectiveness and to avoid the critical phenomenon of drug tolerance and acquired resistance in patients with lung cancer still remains an unmet medical need. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) and circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) are two complementary approaches to define tumor heterogeneity and clonal evolution in a non-invasive manner and to perform functional studies on metastatic cells. Finally, the recent discovery that the tumor microenvironment architecture can be faithfully recapitulated in vitro represents a novel pre-clinical frontier with the potential to optimize more effective immunology-based precision therapies that could rapidly move forward to the clinic.
Insights
Lung cancer remains a leading cause of death, often diagnosed at advanced stages. New strategies using circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) and tumor microenvironments show promise for improving lung cancer treatment effectiveness.
Area of Science:
- Oncology
- Molecular Biology
- Cancer Research
Background:
- Lung cancer is the most common and lethal cancer, frequently diagnosed at advanced stages.
- Tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) and molecular profiling have improved advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treatment.
- Overcoming drug tolerance and acquired resistance in lung cancer remains a critical challenge.
Purpose of the Study:
- To explore novel strategies for enhancing lung cancer treatment effectiveness.
- To investigate methods for overcoming drug resistance in lung cancer.
- To highlight the potential of circulating biomarkers and in vitro models for advancing lung cancer therapies.
Main Methods:
- Utilizing circulating tumor cells (CTCs) and circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) to analyze tumor heterogeneity and clonal evolution non-invasively.
- Employing in vitro recapitulation of tumor microenvironment architecture for pre-clinical studies.
Main Results:
- Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) and circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) offer complementary non-invasive approaches to study tumor characteristics.
- In vitro models of tumor microenvironment architecture provide a novel pre-clinical platform.
Conclusions:
- Advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treatment can be optimized through non-invasive biomarkers like ctDNA and CTCs.
- In vitro tumor microenvironment models represent a promising frontier for developing effective, precision-based cancer immunotherapies.
- Further research into these areas could lead to rapid clinical translation for improved lung cancer patient outcomes.
More Related Videos
06:03Orthotopic Transplantation of Syngeneic Lung Adenocarcinoma Cells to Study PD-L1 Expression
Published on: January 19, 2019
11:31Using Micro-computed Tomography for the Assessment of Tumor Development and Follow-up of Response to Treatment in a Mouse Model of Lung Cancer
Published on: May 20, 2016
Related Concept Videos
02:57Targeted Cancer Therapies
There are several types of targeted therapies against...
02:43Mouse Models of Cancer Study
The development of transgenic, knockout, and knock-in mice has led to an exponential increase in their use as model organisms in research,...