Engraftment of resected pancreatic adenocarcinoma in SCID mice and patient survival following surgical resection: Roswell Park's experience.

185 Background: Preclinical models developed by implanting resected pancreatic cancer from human donors into immunocompromised (SCID) mice have been valuable in understanding the disease’s biology and developing therapies. The ability of resected tumors to engraft successfully has previously been reported to be a poor prognostic marker. This study was conducted to investigate the relationship between successful engraftment and clinical outcome by analyzing such a model developed at Roswell Park over the last decade. Methods: A retrospective review of 48 donor patients (27 males and 21 females) whose resected pancreatic adenocarcinoma was xenografted in SCID mice between 1999-2009 was conducted. The clinical outcome and baseline information were correlated with engraftment outcome. The expression of potential biomarkers correlating with engraftment was evaluated by performing immunohistochemistry on the initial donor surgical specimens. The expression was scored, assigned an average index value and categor...