Abstract
Although brain tumors have been known tremendously over the past decade, there are still many problems to be solved. The etiology of brain tumors is not well understood and the treatment remains modest. There is in great need to develop a suitable brain tumor models that faithfully mirror the etiology of human brain neoplasm and subsequently get more efficient therapeutic approaches for these disorders. In this review, we described the current status of animal models of brain tumors and analyzed their advantages and disadvantages. Additionally, prokaryotic clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated protein 9 (Cas9), a versatile genome editing technology for investigating the functions of target genes, and its application were also introduced in our present work. We firstly proposed that brain tumor modeling could be well established via CRISPR/Cas9 techniques. And CRISPR/Cas9-mediated brain tumor modeling was likely to be more suitable for figuring out the pathogenesis of brain tumors, as CRISPR/Cas9 platform was a simple and more efficient biological toolbox for implementing mutagenesis of oncogenes or tumor suppressors that were closely linked with brain tumors.
Highlights
There is in great need to develop suitable brain tumor models that faithfully reflect the www.impactjournals.com/oncotarget etiology of human brain neoplasms
The cells transplanted in the cell-derived xenograft (CDX) model are mainly high-grade origin and this model can not comprehensively mimic different grades of brain tumors
The clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/ CRISPR-associated protein 9 (Cas9) system can be served as a novel tool to overcome the shortages of the existing methods
Summary
Primary brain tumors have the highest mortality rates among all the cancers worldwide [1]. From the knowledge about the subtypes of gliomas, the etiology and the molecular mechanism, especially the origins [2], we learned that there were differences between rodent model of gliomas and glioblastoma in human patients. It was reported that the rat glioma model could be induced by implantation of cultured glioma cells (Cell-derived xenograft: CDX) [3, 4] and transplanted tumor fragments (Patient-derived xenograft: PDX) [5]. Medulloblastom was regarded as the most common malignant brain tumor in pediatrics with a poor prognosis and in vivo investigation; it was often induced by transplantation of chemically modified human www.impactjournals.com/oncotarget
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