AVEO Pharma unveils new breast tumor model

The USA's AVEO Pharmaceuticals has developed a system which allows the generation of fully-human breast tumors in mice, a world-first, which it unvelied at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Washington DC.

According to the firm, its Human-in-Mouse system represents a significant improvement in modeling human breast cancer compared to existing xenograft models and offers the potential for significantly-improved predictability in preclinical drug testing.

Traditional xenograft models, the mainstay of oncology preclinical drug testing, have been poorly predictive of clinical outcomes in treating human cancers, which many oncologists attribute to their fundamentally artificial nature, the company noted.