FCF is please to announce that it has established a new partnership with the Center for Patient Derived Models (CPDM) at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. The purpose of this new relationship is to expand, characterize and distribute existing models of FLC; create new FLC models; and make them readily available to the researcher community.

In cancer research, models of the disease are critical elements of the research process. Common model types include patient derived cell line (PDCL) models that use tumor cells immortalized from patient tissue, as well as patient derived xenografts (PDX) which are generated by implanting and growing patient tumor tissue in immunocompromised mice. While imperfect in many ways, cell-line and PDX models are very important for preclinical drug evaluation, especially in rare diseases like FLC. They are frequently used to understand the efficacy, metabolism, and tolerability of new drugs before they are considered for a clinical trial in patients. However, because these models do not perfectly match human tumors and their environment, having a range of models available is very important to support preclinical analyses.

For FLC, the establishment of patient-derived models has been a challenge. Today, only a single cell line and a few PDX models are available to researchers. With this new relationship, FCF hopes to change that situation. Using the Dana Farber team’s support, we plan to make any cell lines and PDX models that our partner institutions are willing to distribute available to other research teams investigating FLC. We want to share “lessons learned” on model creation, so that more and more FLC models can be developed and delivered to researchers. We hope that the deep experience of Dana-Farber’s CPDM team in developing, characterizing, and distributing models for other diseases will be a great asset for this effort.

FCF is thrilled to partner with institutions like Dana-Farber that can help us make important research “enablers”, like disease models, widely available to researchers. According to Patty Cogswell, FCF’s Biobank Coordinator, “We are excited to work with a world-class institution like Dana-Farber on model development, expansion and distribution. Research collaboration is essential to making progress against this disease. By linking patient tissue collection efforts at our biobank with Dana-Farber’s capabilities and openly sharing the results, we believe that can significantly improve the availability of FLC models for the research community.”