Patient Derived Tumor Xenografts: Historical Background

The poor success rate of preclinical cancer drug development and screening in the past decades was in part due to a lack of clinically relevant animal cancer models. Recently, patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models, which are developed by implanting small pieces of human tumors into immune-deficient hosts, provide a vastly improved representation of a patient’s clinical situation and have been used as a valuable tool for anticancer drug development and precision medicine. Although PDX technology may be considered as a recent innovation, using an animal model to recapitulate a human cancer has been a long-standing goal of cancer research as early as the eighteenth century. In this chapter, we review the history of the development of PDX modeling.