Application Note

< Previous         Next >  
Transgenic strategies to generate heterogeneous hepatic cancer models in zebrafish
Fei Fei1, LeiWang1, Shaoyang Sun1, Kunpeng Lv1, Yuxiao Yao1, Jingjing Wang1, Min Yu1, and Xu Wang 1,2,*
1 Key Laboratory of Metabolism and Molecular Medicine, Ministry of Education, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai 200032, China
2 Cancer Metabolism Laboratory, Cancer Institute, Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center, Shanghai 200032, China
*Correspondence to:Xu Wang, E-mail: wangxu2013@fudan.edu.cn
J Mol Cell Biol, Volume 11, Issue 11, November 2019, 1021-1023,  https://doi.org/10.1093/jmcb/mjz083

Intratumor heterogeneity describes phenomena that cancer cells from a single focal population can be highly diverse in morphology, gene expression, metabolism, motility, proliferation, metastatic potential, and drug sensitivity (McGranahan and Swanton, 2017). The heterogeneity is the consequence of cancer evolution and the major cause of therapeutic failure due to drug resistance (McGranahan and Swanton, 2017). Theoretically, multi-target combination therapy may eliminate heterogeneous cancer cells but may also induce severe side effects and promote the genesis of novel malignancy. Therefore, further investigations on the pattern and mechanism of cancer heterogeneity are required, with the hope to better refine the treatment strategies. However, there is lack of appropriate in vivo cancer models for simulating multidimensional heterogeneity. Patient/cell-derived tumor xenografts (P/CDX) and spontaneous models induced by toxic substances are naturally heterogeneous in cellular composition during the time but are also highly personalized or unrepeatable. By contrast, transgenic cancer models provide definite genetic backgrounds via direct manipulation of oncogenic pathways; however, the tissue-specific modifications are usually on the whole organ level and poorly mimic the focal lesion(s) in the real cancer patients.