Establishment and characterization of a new hamster pancreatic cancer cell line: the biological activity and the binding characteristics of EGF or TGF-alpha

Progress in Animal Models of Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma

As a common gastrointestinal tumor, the incidence of pancreatic cancer has been increasing in recent years. The disease shows multi-gene, multi-step complex evolution from occurrence to dissemination. Furthermore, pancreatic cancer has an insidious onset and an extremely poor prognosis, so it is difficult to obtain cinical specimens at different stages of the disease, and it is, therefore, difficult to observe tumorigenesis and tumor development in patients with pancreatic cancer. At present, no standard protocols stipulate clinical treatment of pancreatic cancer, and the benefit rate of new targeted therapies is low. For this reason, a well-established preclinical model of pancreatic cancer must be established to allow further exploration of the occurrence, development, invasion, and metastasis mechanism of pancreatic cancer, as well as to facilitate research into new therapeutic targets. A large number of animal models of pancreatic cancer are currently available, including a cancer cell line-based xenograft, a patient-derived xenograft, several mouse models (including transgenic mice), and organoid models. These models have their own characteristics, but they still cannot perfectly predict the clinical outcome of the new treatment. In this paper, we present the distinctive features of the currently popular pancreatic cancer models, and discuss their preparation methods, clinical relations, scientific purposes and limitations.

Histological complexities of pancreatic lesions from transgenic mouse models are consistent with biological and morphological heterogeneity of human pancreatic cancer

Although pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer death, it has received much less attention compared to other malignancies. There are several transgenic animal models available for studies of pancreatic carcinogenesis, but most of them do not recapitulate, histologically, human pancreatic cancer. Here we review some detailed molecular complexity of human pancreatic cancer and their reflection in histomorphological complexities of pancreatic lesions developed in various transgenic mouse models with a special concern for studying the effects of chemotherapeutic and chemopreventive agents. These studies usually require a large number of animals that are at the same age and gender and should be either homozygote or heterozygote but not a mixture of both. Only single-transgene models can meet these special requirements, but many currently available models require a mouse to simultaneously bear several transgene alleles. Thus it is imperative to identify new gene promoters or enhancers that are specific for the ductal cells of the pancreas and are highly active in vivo so as to establish new single-transgene models that yield pancreatic ductal adenocarcinomas for chemotherapeutic and chemopreventive studies.