Charles River Laboratories has created an application to help cancer researchers obtain access to information on tumor models it has developed.
The objective is to help these scientists design efficient cell-culture and animal studies, the company said.
Charles River said its web interface, called the Tumor Model Compendium, should help speed up researchers’ work and reduce their costs. This could lead to potential treatments getting to clinical trials faster, it said.
The company said its user-friendly interface will help scientists comb through vast amounts of cancer data for information to help them design their studies.
Charles River’s collection includes a wide array of tumor models covering several tumor types, including patient-derived and cell line-derived grafts. It also includes patient information and genetically identical mouse models.
The company has more than 450 patient-derived tumor grafts representing all major tumor types. The grafts were taken from a patients’ tumors and stored with little manipulation to conserve many of the tumors’ original characteristics. This means they can be important tools for evaluating potential cancer therapies’ effectiveness.
Charles River said the collection includes information on tumor cell lines it has grown in the lab, which are commonly used in preclinical-trial studies assessing a compound’s effectiveness and toxicity.
An additional part of the resource is human leukocyte antigen subtype information. It will help researchers control for immune system variability, improving their studies’ effectiveness. This information is particularly important at a time when personalized immunotherapies are surging, and the individual characteristics of our immune cells, such as human leukocyte antigen, are crucial to the treatments’ development.
“The oncology [cancer treatment] field is rapidly changing and expanding, making it critically important for researchers to be as efficient as possible,” Birgit Girshick, Charles River’s corporate executive vice president of discovery and safety assessment, said in a press release. “If we can save researchers any amount of time in getting their studies started, that ultimately leads to safe and effective treatments being delivered to patients faster.”
“In oncology, there is a massive amount of information to sort through,” said Aidan Synnott, Charles River’s executive director of discovery oncology. “The Tumor Model Compendium makes the data easily accessible and simple to digest, and allows scientists to select the most relevant data for their research.”
