Mouse models for cancer

Anton Berns, The Netherlands Cancer Institute, Amsterdam.

Mouse models for cancer serve several purposes. They can be used as a system to gain insight into the underlying mechanisms of tumor initiation and tumor maintenance. To be of value for human cancer, it is important that the model system reproduces critical aspects observed in human tumors. A range of sophisticated genetic methods have been developed to reproduce, often even very closely, the human disease condition. This can provide insight into the cell of origin of the tumor, the potential role of cancer initiating cells, and mechanisms of tumor progression. As such the mouse can also help identifying the critical cooperating pathways in tumorigenesis.
A second important utility of mouse models is to test intervention strategies. While earlier xenograft transplantation models appeared poor predictors for successful therapies, the spontaneous mouse models often show a similar degree of heterogeneity and are equally difficult to treat as human tumors.
The progress made in using mouse models for these different applications will be discussed.