specially created animal 'cancer avatars' could personalise treatments - what's the best air purifier to buy

Claire Wilson cancer is often considered not a disease, but many.
Each person's tumor has a different mutation, so, for example, while some kind of treatment may cure a person's breast cancer, it may fail when it comes to treating someone else's breast cancer.
The difficult part is to know which treatment is best for a particular tumor.
Now, doctors are starting to determine the best option by testing different drugs on specially created animals that have been given a replica of the patient's cancer-known as the "cancer avatar ".
One option may be to produce fruit flies with the same genetic mutation as human cancer.
These flies are small and only survive for a very short time, which means researchers can produce a large number of flies in multiple rows of test tubes.
Robot devices can then be used to screen hundreds of drug combinations on flies.
This method is used to guide the treatment of a patient with advanced colon cancer.
He died about three years later, but it could be longer than he had been living, says Ross Kagan of Icahn Medical School in Mount Sinai, New York.
Before making the fruit fly Avatar, the person's cancer had spread around his body and developed resistance to several drugs.
Gene sequencing showed at least 9 cancer mutations in the tumor.
The team genetically engineered a fly that had all these mutations in the gut cells and then cultivated more than 300,000 flies.
They then developed a robotic system to feed flies and test different drugs on flies.
In this way, they screened 121 existing drugs individually or in a maximum of three combinations, including the treatment of anti-cancer drugs or other diseases.
Several combinations prevented flies from dying and slowed the growth of their intestinal tumors.
The doctor finally identified a cancer drug called trametinib and a osteoporosis treatment called zoledronate, which has the best efficacy and predicted safety, and gave these drugs
Animal avatars are necessary, says Cagan, because although we already have some cancer drugs designed to fight individual mutations, we can't predict how a genetically altered tumor will react yet.
"For people with 9 tumor mutations, we don't know the best combination of drugs yet.
However, this is not a treatment.
11 months later, the man stopped the treatment.
The team sequenced the DNA of tumor cells in his blood, but was unable to identify mutations that made it resistant to new therapies.
The mouse avatar is a broader approach.
These are all developed at several universities, and an American company called champion oncology has provided this testing service to cancer patients.
When a person removes the tumor, a small piece is sent to the company and the cells are then implanted into a small number of mice.
A few months later, the results of the drug
The test on the mouse will be fed back to the doctor.
However, flies are particularly suitable for robotic screening methods, which may also be better for those who care about animal research ethics.
However, the downside is that they are very different from humans, for example, there is a very simple immune system.
But all the different models have their pros and cons, said Rita Fio of the unknown center in Lisbon, Portugal, who is developing the incarnation of the zebra fish. No large-
The Scale trial also shows that either of these methods leads to a longer life span than the doctor has just made the best judgment.
"Our goal is to predict ahead of time what is the best treatment and get the right medicine for the first time," Fior said . ".
"Then we can stop the trial of the patient.
Journal reference: scientific progress, tujing: 10. 1126/sciadv.