Since humanized and SCID mice are very expensive to procure and maintain. I was wondering to develop a cost and effective approach to develop an in vivo model for cancer research. Thymectomy is well established method to cause immunosuppression. I was wondering what will happen if we try to develop PDX model in thymectomized alone or in combination with immunosuppressants in C57bl/6 or Balb/c mice. Will tumor model be developed ?
I don't think this is going to very successful. PDX studies use NSG or NRG mice because they have multiple immunodeficiencies (T cells, B cells, NK cells, defective macrophages and dendritic cells, etc). A simple thymectomy would 1) not remove the T cells that developed before the thymectomy and 2) would not remove all the other cells that will have antitumor effects. PDX models already suffer from low efficiency (the "best" cancers like colorectal are only ~50% efficient), so preserving so much immunity in a thymectomized mouse would probably be a bad idea. NRG and NSG mice are pretty easy to breed and we just maintain an active breeding colony to produce recipient animals for our PDX generation, maintenance, and experiments.
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