Genetically Engineered Mice for Cancer Research: Design, Analysis, Pathways, Validation and Pre-clinical Testing

Genetically-engineered mouse models for cancer research have become invaluable tools for studying cancer biology and evaluating novel therapeutic approaches. This volume focuses on state-of-the-art methods for generating, analyzing and validating such models for studying aspects of human cancer biology. Additionally, these models are emerging as important pre-clinical systems in which to test cancer prevention and therapeutic strategies in order to select compounds for testing in clinical trials.

Technological advances in manipulating the mouse genome has led to the development of sophisticated genetically-engineered models of human cancer that recapitulate many molecular, biologic and histologic features of human tumors. This book provides an overview of the design considerations and technical approaches used to generate these important models of human cancer. These models are designed to recapitulate molecular aberrations in target organs known to drive human cancers. State-of-the-art methods to analyze genome and transcriptome alterations in these models and particular relationships to human cancers are presented. Mouse-human comparisons of tumor pathologies are exemplified. Criteria for selecting relevant models for preclinical studies that might be translatable to the treatment of human cancers are discussed. The topics presented in this book will be invaluable to both newcomers to the field as well as established investigators who use genetically-engineered mouse models to study the development, progression and treatment of cancer.