Modeling osteosarcoma: In vitro and in vivo approaches

Osteosarcoma is the most common cancer of bone and is most common in teenagers. Despite this it is a relatively rare tumor and clinical translation of research progress has been slow. The development and application of pre-clinical models using human OS cell lines and xenografts has been complemented by the development of OS models in other organisms. The advances in mouse genetic manipulation approaches have yielded numerous recent examples of OS models that show high fidelity to the human disease. These mouse models, coupled with models in zebrafish and spontaneous disease in pet dogs, form the basis for a new pre-clinical testing platform that can rapidly establish efficacy of numerous therapies across a range of species and OS subtypes. The increasing knowledge of the mutational landscape of human OS from sequencing approaches needs to be incorporated to refine and improve the OS models to establish the best possible pre-clinical testing.