Large Animal Models of Breast Cancer

Abstract

In this mini review the status, advantages, and disadvantages of large animal modeling of breast cancer (BC) will be discussed. While most older studies of large animal BC models utilized canine and feline subjects, more recently there has been interest in development of porcine BC models, with some early promising results for modeling human disease. Widely used rodent models of BC were briefly reviewed to give context to the work on the large animal BC models. Availability of large animal BC models could provide additional tools for BC research, including availability of human-sized subjects and BC models with greater biologic relevance.

Keywords: BRCA1; TP53; animal models; breast cancer; large animal models; porcine model.

Figure 1

Tumor Sink. In this example, murine tumor:body mass ratio is 400x the porcine ratio, even though murine tumor mass is only ~12% that of the porcine tumor. If a targeted drug preferentially concentrates in the tumor (i.e., tumor sink), then a given drug dose in the mouse may have a relatively high concentration in the tumor with respect to the plasma. The effect of tumor sink on plasma concentration at the same dose in the pig would be negligible because of the large body size. Thus, the same dose in the pig would produce a higher plasma concentration, possibly producing greater systemic toxicity than in the mouse.