“A graduate student can build a whole PhD around building a model for one mutation,” Ely says. However, this approach is labor-intensive and requires several months or even years to produce and analyze mice with a single cancer-linked mutation.

Over the past 20 years, researchers have used genetic engineering to create mouse models by deleting tumor suppressor genes or activating cancer-promoting genes. Testing cancer drugs in mouse models is an important step in determining whether they are safe and effective enough to go into human clinical trials. Zack Ely, PhD, a former MIT graduate student who is now a visiting scientist at MIT, and MIT graduate student Nicolas Mathey-Andrews are the lead authors of the paper. Koch Professor of Biology, a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, and one of the senior authors of the new study.įrancisco Sánchez-Rivera, an assistant professor of biology at MIT and member of the Koch Institute, and David Liu, a professor in the Harvard University Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and a core institute member of the Broad Institute, are also senior authors of the study, which appears today in Nature Biotechnology. “This is a remarkably powerful tool for examining the effects of essentially any mutation of interest in an intact animal, and in a fraction of the time required for earlier methods,” says Tyler Jacks, the David H. Such models could help researchers identify and test new drugs that target these mutations. They believe this technique could also be used for nearly any other type of cancer mutation that has been identified. Using this technique, which is based on CRISPR genome-editing technology, the researchers have created models of several different mutations of the cancer-causing gene Kras, in different organs.

In an advance that could help scientists make a dent in that long list of unexplored mutations, MIT researchers have developed a way to easily engineer specific cancer-linked mutations into mouse models. However, for the vast majority of those mutations, researchers are unsure of how they contribute to cancer because there’s no easy way to study them in animal models. Genomic studies of cancer patients have revealed thousands of mutations linked to tumor development.

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