The following is an edited excerpt.
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is at the forefront of a new approach to studying human cancers. At the center, mice are given genes that make them develop tumors in the same organs as humans, and the researchers watch the tumors’ growth inside the animals’ bodies.
What’s more, with genetic advances in studies of human tumors, the researchers do not have to implant human cancer cells in all their complexity into mice to study the cancers; instead, they can give the mice just a few mutated genes that seem to drive a tumor.
Read the full story here: Tiny Patients, Major Goals