New model could speed up colon cancer research
Using the gene-editing system known as CRISPR, MIT researchers have shown in mice that they can generate colon tumors that very closely resemble human tumors. This advance should help scientists learn more about how the disease progresses and allow them to test new therapies. Once formed, many of these experimental tumors spread to the liver, just like human colon cancers often do. These metastases are the most common cause of death from colon cancer. “That’s been a missing piece in the study of colon cancer. There is really no reliable method for recapitulating the metastatic progression from a primary tumor in the colon to the liver,” says Omer Yilmaz, an MIT assistant professor of biology, a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and the lead senior author of the study, which appears in the May 1 issue of Nature Biotechnology. The study builds on recent work by Tyler Jacks, the...