Overview
- The Human Cancer Models Initiative published the compendium and companion functional studies in Nature on Wednesday, Aug. 5, making 665 rigorously validated patient-derived models and their data publicly available through ATCC and public repositories.
- The collection is mostly three-dimensional organoids and represents about 25 cancer types drawn from roughly 2,780 donor samples with an overall conversion success of about one-third of submitted tumors.
- Systematic comparisons show the models closely match their source tumors, with reported concordance of about 97.8% for genetic alterations, 95% for epigenetic features, and 92% for RNA expression.
- Two companion papers produced large-scale functional maps: the Wellcome Sanger team created a 256-organoid biobank and ran CRISPR screens across 162 organoids, while Broad-led profiling of more than 300 models expanded the Cancer Dependency Map and identified thousands of gene dependencies including KRAS allele-specific differences and organoid-specific metabolic vulnerabilities.
- By making models, clinical metadata and functional screens broadly accessible, the effort aims to speed preclinical target validation, drug development and AI-driven analyses and the consortium says it will shift from the main phase to planned expansion of pediatric, rarer and more diverse models.