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. 2022 Jul 19;12(7):1177. doi: 10.3390/jpm12071177

Table 1.

Rodent models for personalized medicine.

Use Case Advantages Disadvantages
Oncology PDX 1
  • Recapitulate the intra- and inter-tumor heterogeneity of human cancer

  • Suitable for biomarker discovery

  • Can perform personalized drug screening of individual patient tumors

  • Can establish large collaborative PDX platforms

PDX 1
  • Engraftment-induced molecular divergence from the original tumor

  • Cannot study metastases in subcutaneous models

  • Lack of stromal and immune compartments

  • Variable and unpredictable engraftment rates

  • High cost, technically challenging

  • Lack of standardized protocols

GEMM 2
  • Allow de novo tumor formation that recapitulates molecular and histopathological features of human disease in a native immune-proficient microenvironment

GEMM 2
  • Very long development time; transition of data to the clinic is slow

  • Mouse tumor with reduced clonal heterogeneity compared with human tumors

Brain disorders
  • Suitable for studying the side-effects of chronic drug administrations

  • Suitable for biomarker discovery

  • Suitable for chimeric models

  • Development of behavioral assays that can be used to evaluate drug efficacy at the behavioral level

  • Lack of biological understanding

  • Do not fully recapitulate the pathophysiology of human conditions and human phenotypes

  • Use of young animals is not representative for pathology

  • Species-to-species differences

  • Limited in predicting treatment efficacy in human disorders

1 PDX—patient-derived xenograft; 2 GEMM—genetically modified mouse models.