New Xenograft System to Boost Search for Anticancer Drugs

Old gold and silver mines are being resurrected as the price for these precious commodities soar; an American biotech firm is trying to do the same with abandoned cancer drug candidates.

Of the many thousands of chemical compounds that have been synthesized, only a few have survived the tremendously expensive passage to clinical development. One reason for this has been the lack of a real-time clinical model system. To repair this lack Champions Biotechnology, Inc. (Baltimore, MD, USA) has developed the Biomerk Tumorgraft xenograft system.

Instead of using commercial cancer cell lines to evaluate potential anticancer drugs, Champions' technique relies on the transplantation of cancer cells directly from a patient's tumor into a specially bred line of immunocompromised mice. The resulting tumors closely reflect human cancer biology, and their response to drugs is predictive of clinical outcomes in cancer patients.

Champions says that this type of model system is predictive of how drugs perform in clinical settings and are useful in determining the compounds' optimal applications in order to design appropriate Phase I/II clinical trials.

"The current financial climate is taking a dramatic toll on many biotechnology companies," said Dr. Douglas D. Burkett, CEO of Champions Biotechnology, Inc. "Venture funding, which is always difficult to obtain, is scarce. Drug companies and academic research laboratories are scaling back spending levels. Our mission is to improve oncology drug development efficiency and clinical success rates. We believe this is made possible by testing new and dormant drug compounds in our predictive animal models. Since traditional animal models are not predictive, expensive human clinical trials are often initiated and fail because the optimal application of the drug was never discovered. Our Biomerk Tumorgrafts mimic human cancers and provide an affordable means to determine a drug's best application, if any, prior to beginning expensive clinical trials in humans. This ultimately lowers development costs while improving the likelihood of clinical and market success. Compounds that sit dormant in the portfolios of all major pharmaceutical companies could represent a potential treasure trove of new treatment drugs. We believe that Biomerk Tumorgrafts will eventually become an industry standard as the predictor of clinical outcomes for oncology drugs."

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Champions Biotechnology, Inc.