Research advances in application of patient-derived xenografts in epithelial ovarian cancer

Patient-derived xenografts (PDX) model,which is established by using transplanted fresh human tumor tissue,can dramatically help to screen out effective drugs during non first-line therapy.Moreover,PDX can be used for the research of new drug development,tumorigenesis and metastasis mechanism in cancer.Epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) is the most lethal gynecologic malignancy.About 75% of ovarian cancer patients relapse and/or develop chemo-resistant disease after initial response to standard-of-care treatment with platinum-based therapies.This article reviews the establishment of PDX of EOC,its histopathological characteristics,molecular characteristics and the application in drug research and survival prediction.