Advanced Colorectal Cancer Orthotopic Patient-Derived Xenograft Models for Cancer and Stem Cell Research.

In the recent years has being a great expansion of new preclinical models of colorectal cancer (CRC) based on patient-derived cells, from ex vivo 2D cell lines, toward 3D tumoroids or animal xenografts. These new technologies have been key to overcome historical limitations in CRC research such as precision medicine, pharmacogenomic screenings, or investigating mechanism of drug resistance. Here we describe a method to generate metastatic CRC in mice with patient-derived cells and the evaluation of drug response with computerized tomography. CRC at this advanced stage is the most frequent situation in patients enrolled in therapies with novel drugs that in some cases are designed to target metastatic cells. Therefore, these orthotopic models could be considered the best to recapitulate advance CRC and are therefore becoming instrumental to investigate the biology behind drug-response in metastatic disease.