Lab mice helping cancer patients to tackle tumours
Like 1 Dislike 0 Published on 3 Aug 2015
Cancer patients are taking treatment into their own hands - with a little help from laboratory mice.
Mice are often used to test drugs - but now a private lab is breeding the rodents to carry tumours of cancer patients, to see what treatment they might best respond to.
This isn't a normal white mouse.
Turn it around - and you'll see a shaved patch on its side, with a growth protruding through the skin.
This is a part of a breast cancer tumour that was found in patient Eileen Youtie.
Cancer patients like Youtie are paying a private lab to breed mice that carry bits of their own tumour, so treatments can be tried first on the customised animals.
"You do what you've got to do, you know?" says Youtie, who's from Miami.
She's using mice as a guide to care for her hard-to-treat form of breast cancer.
"You get scared, and even though everyone says 'it's going to be okay', they said it the first time, and you just take control."
Youtie has a genetic mutation that makes her more susceptible to breast cancer.
The idea is to see which drugs might work best on a specific person's specific cancer.
The mice may help patients make what can be very hard choices under difficult circumstances.
Studies can suggest a certain chemotherapy may help, but patients wonder whether it will work for them.
And often there's more than one choice, and if the first one fails, a patient may be too sick to try another.
So hundreds of people have made "mouse avatars" over the last few years to test different chemotherapies.
Several labs breed these mice, but the main supplier to patients has been Champions Oncology, a company based in Hackensack, New Jersey, that also operates in London, Tel Aviv and Singapore.
Walk into a lab here in Baltimore - and you'd be forgiven for thinking it's a pet shop.
Tall shelves hold row upon row of plastic containers, each labelled with cancer patients' names.
About 7,000 mice are kept here in six rooms that resemble stock rooms of a shoe store.
Most mice are white-haired females with beady red eyes, but others are hairless. Some live alone while others climb over one another and sleep in small piles.
All have easy access to food and water, and many bear signs of a tumour transplant - a shaved portion of hair, an incision scar and a lump growing off one side.
Cancer patients have their biopsied tumour sample sent to Champions.
"We implant that tumour tissue into an immuno-deficient mouse, or a mouse that doesn't have an intact immune system," explains Dr. Angela Davies, Chief Medical Officer of Champions.
"We can grow that tumour and then test different drug therapies to be able to predict which drugs are going to work best in a patient."
Davies says that in the mouse avatars, the tumour tissues remain so similar to those still in the patient, that they can mirror what may happen to a patient's tumour when given a certain therapy.
Champions will implant bits of the same tumour tissue in several mice and test different drugs on each mouse.
"The tumour graft model has no limitations in terms of the kinds of drugs that we can test," says Davies. "We can test chemotherapy and targeted agents."
She says this approach offers highly personalised cancer care for each patient because the lab takes many factors into account when determining which drugs to test.
"The way that they're selected is influenced by the tumour type, the prior therapies that the patient may have had, in addition to considering genomic testing that the patient may have had that suggests specifics drugs that may be of benefit," says Davies.
But some cancer experts warn there are no guarantees the mice will help, and the mouse avatars should be considered highly experimental.
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