The Barretos Cancer Hospital Animal Facility: Implementation and Results of a Dedicated Platform for Preclinical Oncology Models

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Preclinical models of Latin-American patients are scarce and urgently needed to properly translate our results, from bench to bedside, with a focus on personalized therapy. In addition, to discover more effective treatments for different cancer types we described here, an overview of the infrastructure of Barretos Cancer Hospital Animal Facility was designed to attend a multidisciplinary team and organized to perform pre-clinic in vivo models. This work describes the establishment of conventional mice models, using several commercial cancer cell lines, genetically modified mouse models that develop specific tumor types (colon cancer or brain tumor) and a platform of Brazilian patient-derived xenograft models (PDX) from patients diagnosed with cancer. These models have been used to understand cancer biology, tumor pathways and to enhance translational studies. Moreover, PDX models, which preserve cell interaction and cellular heterogeneity of parent tumors, have shown promise for identifying new biomarkers, testing panels of anticancer drug screening, and therapeutic strategies prior to clinical trials. We illustrated the establishment of a novel animal facility that fosters cancer research and preclinical studies in Brazil that will open novel avenues for studying tumor biology and tumor microenvironments to identify potential therapeutic targets, anti-cancer drugs, and personalized therapeutic approaches. ABSTRACT: The Barretos Cancer Hospital Animal Facility (BCHAF) is a unique facility in Brazil exclusively dedicated to working with animal models for cancer research. In this article, we briefly present our modern facility and the main experiments performed, focusing on mutant strains of mice (PTCH-knockout and Apc(Min) mice), xenograft models, and patient-derived xenografts (PDXs). Our results show the progress and challenges in establishing these models and the need for having an appropriate representation of our cancer population to better understand tumor biology and to identify cancer biomarkers, which could be putatively targeted, allowing for personalized therapy.