Annual Report 2017

Toshio Imai, Mami Takahashi, Tetsuya Ishikawa, Mie Naruse, Rikako Ishigamori, Yukino Machida, Naoaki Uchiya, Yukiko Nakamura, Makiko Saitou, Yoshinori Ikarashi, Masashi Yasuda, Yukihiro Matsumi, Satoshi Ikeda, Junichi Zukeyama, Yudai Seki, Towa Nagai, Kenjiro Matsunaga, Atsushi Nakasako, Yukiko Sudo

Introduction

 The important role of the Central Animal Division is health management of experimental animals and maintenance of animal experimentation facility. Some researchers and technical staff also act for several support services, which are provided based on their biological skills, such as reproductive technologies for animal cleaning / embryo-sperm preservation, pathological analysis of mouse phenotypes, and establishment of expandable cells / xenograft transplantable models from clinical cancer tissues (PDX models).

Our team and what we do

 Animal models are essential not only for basic cancer research but also for the translational research (TR) field. We willingly contribute to establish useful animal models including genetically engineered mice (GEM) for basic cancer research and PDX models for TR, and to analyze their molecular details.

Research activities

 To explore intrinsic and environmental carcinogenic factors and clarify their molecular mechanisms in human, we establish and improve genetically-modified animal carcinogenesis models and analyze their phenotypes under the conditions of environmental factor loaded. As for the TR field, we established unique PDX models, e.g, an EGFR-mutation-harboring lung adenocarcinoma model, which was found to be highly metastatic to the lung, and rare cancers including soft tissue tumors.

Education

 We contribute to organize annual training sessions for researchers and technical experts on animal experiments. In addition, technical trainees are received for skill acquirement on animal experiments and mouse phenotype analysis.

Future prospects

 Research approaches using immune deficient/severely immune-deficient mice have become increasingly important these several years, and microbiological controls of the animal experimentation facility should become more strictly controlled. For the development of the research field to evaluate molecular-targeted agents for lung, colorectal and other cancers and to conquer rare cancers/refractory cancers, the establishment of their PDX models should be systematically organized.