Gene expression profiling of 49 human tumor xenografts from in vitro culture through multiple in vivo passages--strategies for data mining in support of therapeutic studies.

Background: Development of cancer therapeutics partially depends upon selection of appropriate animal models. Therefore, improvements to model selection are beneficial.

Results: Forty-nine human tumor xenografts at in vivo passages 1, 4 and 10 were subjected to cDNA microarray analysis yielding a dataset of 823 Affymetrix HG-U133 Plus 2.

Real-time PCR-based assay to quantify the relative amount of human and mouse tissue present in tumor xenografts.

Background: Xenograft samples used to test anti-cancer drug efficacies and toxicities in vivo contain an unknown mix of mouse and human cells. Evaluation of drug activity can be confounded by samples containing large amounts of contaminating mouse tissue. We have developed a real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) assay using TaqMan technology to quantify the amount of mouse tissue that is incorporated into human xenograft samples.