"Approximately 5 (5.12) minutes in attendees came face to face with the exceptional oncolytic viruses developed by Professor Yuman Fong, which have successfully killed all cell lines against the NCI 60 pre-clinically including Pancreatic, Colorectal, Colon and Lung Cancer"https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2016.19364US cancer institute to overhaul tumour cell linesVeteran cells to be retired in favour of fresh tumour samples grown in miceAfter more than 25 years of heavy use by researchers around the world, the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) has decided to retire the NCI-60, its panel of 60 human cancer cell lines grown in culture, from its drug-screening programme. In late spring of this year, the institute will launch a rejuvenated repository of cancer models that are derived from fresh patient samples and tagged with details about their clinical past.
The NCI action responds to a widespread push for cancer models with a closer link to the patients they are intended to help. On 11 February, cancer researchers gathered in New Orleans, Louisiana, for a meeting hosted by the American Association for Cancer Research that focused on the creation of new cancer models from clinical samples.
Since 1990, industry and academic have screened more than 100,000 compounds using the NCI-60, in order to study the molecular details of cancers and find drugs to treat them.
When the NCI-60 was established, researchers had a very different conception of cancer, says James Doroshow, director of the Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis at the NCI in Bethesda, Maryland. “Thirty years ago, the idea was that if you found a drug that worked on six breast cancer cell lines, then you could use it to treat breast cancer,” he says. “Well, it doesn’t work that way.
Since then, breast cancer has been broken into subcategories that are based on genetic mutations — and each category may respond differently to treatment.
Mix and matchMany pathologists would be hard pressed to guess what kind of tissue the cells in an NCI-60 cell line came from, says Antonio Jimeno, a cancer researcher at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora. Like most other cancer cell lines, the NCI-60 have lived for thousands of generations in culture, an environment that differs radically from their native one. Over time, the cells have adapted to life in plastic petri dishes, altering their genetic make-up and behaviour.
The NCI will continue to supply the NCI-60 cell lines to researchers, but will eventually refocus its drug screening on newer models. It is developing hundreds of ‘patient-derived xenografts’ (PDXs), which are created by implanting small chunks of human tumours into mice. There, the tumours grow in an environment that, although not human, better mimics their native environment. The tumours can be harvested and reimplanted in other mice, allowing researchers to study a given tumour in multiple animals. The NCI will distribute cells from those PDXs, as well as data regarding each tumour’s genetic make-up and gene expression patterns, and the donor’s treatment history.
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