If we examine the cumulative evidence to date using the various leading models of APC, AOM, MNU, BMBDD, MMR,TGF-b, xenograft, and the non-murine zebrafish, models of human colorectal cancer (CRC) disease, then the orthotopic model (especially orthotopic implantation) has the advantage of closely mimicking human CRC including tumor microenvironment [1,2,3,4;10]. It recapitulates all of the critical components of the tumor microenvironment, as well as all of the angiogenic factors, growth factors, and cytokines, thus finely mimicking the human CRC in terms of both metastasis and microenvironments, allowing evaluation of the alterations in and modulations of the microenvironment on tumorigenesis and progression [4].
Thus, Japanese investigators [8] evaluated the efficacy of anti-human VEGF antibody (bevacizumab) with or without irinotecan (CPT-11) postoperative adjuvant therapy against lung metastases in which neovascularization was already induced using orthotopically implanted colon cancer in rat, and the results from orthotopic-implantation tumor model suggested that a higher efficacy may be expected when bevacizumab is combined with the cytotoxic agent irinotecan (CPT-11), compared to bevacizumab monotherapy, and this has indeed been clinically confirmed [8]. In contrast, the xenograft model fails to represent the CRC tumor microenvironment, and with potential divergence of signaling pathways between its model and human disease [5,6,7].
These facts lead to a well-evidenced principle: that drugs that modulate the tumor microenvironment and the tumor-host interaction - as do so many oncologic agents - must be studied in orthotopic models [9], and recently these models have been extended and refined into sophisticated GEMM-derived orthotopic transplant models of Kras-mutant colorectal cancer for high-throughput drug discovery screening and candidate drug validation [11].
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