Global gene expression profiling confirms the molecular fidelity of primary tumor-based orthotopic xenograft mouse models of medulloblastoma.

We previously showed that primary tumor-based orthotopic xenograft mouse models of medulloblastoma replicated the histopathological phenotypes of patients' original tumors. Here, we performed global gene expression profiling of 11 patient-specific xenograft models to further determine whether the xenograft tumors were molecularly accurate during serial subtransplantations in mouse brains and whether they represented all the molecular subtypes of medulloblastoma that were recently described. Analysis of the transcriptomes of 9 pairs of matched passage I xenografts and patients' tumors revealed high correlation coefficients (r(2) > 0.