Preclinical models of prostate cancer

Prostate cancer is the most common non-skin malignancy, yet the biological and molecular characteristics of the disease remain only poorly understood. One of the many reasons for this is that there are so few animal or human laboratory models of prostate cancer. Prostate cancer rarely arises spontaneously in animals, and the human cancer is unusually hard to grow in culture or as xenografts even short-term. The prostate cancer models that do exist are basically rodent models, human cell lines, human xenografts, and gene transfer and transgenic models. Many laboratories have put great effort into developing prostate cancer models, without much success. These efforts recently have been forced to be curtailed, primarily due to a lack of funding. There is good reason to believe, however, that propagation of metastatic tissue will be much more successful. At the University of Washington, the Prostate Cancer Donor Program, organized in a manner similar to existing methods for cadaver organ harvest, has been instituted to help recruit patients for these approaches. Prospects for success of model development also have been improved because of advances in techniques for the maintenance of severe combined immunodeficiency disease mice or nude mice.