Horizon Discovery in-licenses range of melanoma PDX models

Cambridge, UK-headquartered Horizon Discovery (LSE: HZD) says it has taken an exclusive license to 153 melanoma patient-derived Xenograft ( PDX) models from the Wistar Institute, a USA-based biomedical research leader in cancer, immunology and infectious diseases.

Finding predictive models for drug development is a major challenge in cancer research. PDX models are a breakthrough; they allow researchers to examine how human tumors grow and respond to drugs in a living organism. Horizon distribution of the Wistar melanoma PDX collection will allow scientists worldwide to investigate the efficacy and safety of their drugs prior to trials in human populations.

Wistar is providing a selection of PDX models representative of all previously described melanoma subtypes, making the collection one of the most comprehensive collections of well-characterized melanoma PDX models available on the market today. Horizon will offer this collection as ungrafted PDX suspensions or as the basis of in vivo efficacy studies, where clients provide test compounds and Horizon’s team of expert scientists will demonstrate their effect on PDXs grown in mice.