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fork(2) [soylentnews.org] writes:

      Cancer biologists rely on cultured lines of cancer cells. But these cultured cells may not resemble the tumor they came from due genetic change over the years they multiply in labs. This results in situations where an experimental drug that may work well on a cancer cell line doesn't translate into a useful therapy for a patient.

      Science [sciencemag.org] reports that several US and European funding agencies are launching the Human Cancer Models Initiative (HCMI) [cancerresearchuk.org] which hopes to provide the research community with tumor cells that behave more like actual human tumors.

The project involves four groups: the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Bethesda, Maryland; Cancer Research UK in London; the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, U.K.; and the nonprofit Hubrecht Organoid Technology in Utrecht, the Netherlands, which was founded by Hans Clevers, a cancer researcher at the Hubrecht Institute.

      The project will draw on new insights into how to make the mixture of cells from a human tumor grow outside the body. [...]

      HCMI will scale up production of these tissue-based human cancer models and share them with the community. NCI will fund the development of 600 models; the Sanger Institute and Cancer Research UK will create 200; and the Hubrecht Institute will produce 200 models as part of a 2- to 3-year pilot project. [...] Although the focus will be largely on common cancers, such as colon and pancreatic, NCI will try to include rare and childhood cancers too, says Louis Staudt, director of NCI's Center for Cancer Genomics.

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