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Project

Human soft tissue sarcomas xenograft mouse models as an opportunity to improve the therapeutic options for patients.

Soft tissue sarcomas (STS) represent a highly heterogeneous group of rare malignant tumours with diverse clinical, pathological and genetic features. The current management of advanced STS is not satisfactory, and metastasis remains significant problem in sarcoma patients. Therefore there is a need to develop and test new experimental compounds for improving the standard of care of STS patients. Notably, the efficacy and activity of newer drugs might be limited only to specific STS, and influenced by their specific molecular features. Thus, the treatment of STS is now shifting from an era in which treatments included all sarcoma subtypes under one head to an era of more specific therapy for each sarcoma subtype. The creation of reliable pre-clinical in vivo models of STS is crucial for a quick translation of novels therapeutic strategies to the clinic and for finding the molecular signature that would predict the tumour response to a given treatment. To achieve this aim we will develop a panel of different human STS xenograft mouse models to test in vivo the efficacy of a variety of experimental compounds, with a specific focus on angiogenesis inhibitors. The secondary aim is to identify prognostic biomarkers related to the therapeutic response and diagnostic biomarker, adopting molecular and pathological wide-approach assays. Those approaches will generate new therapeutic strategies that eventually would improve the standard of care for STS patients.
Date:1 Jan 2011 →  31 Dec 2014
Keywords:Xenograft, Angiogenesis, Sarcoma, In vivo
Disciplines:Morphological sciences, Oncology