Overview
- A decade-long international effort led by the Human Cancer Models Initiative published companion papers in Nature that together deliver roughly 665–700 validated patient-derived models, mostly organoids, covering about 25–27 cancer types.
- The models show high fidelity to their source tumors with reported concordance of about 97.8% for genetic alterations, 95% for epigenetic features, and 92% for RNA expression based on matched tumor–model comparisons.
- Researchers performed large-scale CRISPR loss-of-function screens and added data from more than 300 profiled models to the Cancer Dependency Map, revealing thousands of gene vulnerabilities and roughly 1,700 links between dependencies and tumor features.
- All validated models and their molecular and clinical annotations have been deposited with the American Type Culture Collection and public repositories so researchers worldwide can obtain the organoids and reuse the datasets.
- The teams say work is not finished: conversion success was about one-third of submitted samples, pediatric and rare cancers and non-European ancestries remain underrepresented, and investigators are calling for continued sample donation and follow-up studies to broaden coverage.