Establishment and Preclinical Therapy of Patient-derived Hepatocellular Carcinoma Xenograft Model

Abstract Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a world-wide health problem. Poor and delayed diagnoses as well as high recurrence rate resulting in high mortality rate. In this study, we established a patient-derived xenograft (PDX) model from HCC patient, and continuously maintained with subcutaneous passage more than 20 times. This HCC PDX tumor exhibited the same histological characteristics with the HCC patient and could be used to verify therapeutic effect of liver cancer. We further evaluated this PDX model by experimental chemotherapy, demonstrating that this HCC PDX model was sensitive to sorafenib treatment. Further, the potential of natural killer cell-based immunotherapy for HCC was tested using this model. We found that NK92 cells effectively suppressed the tumor growth in vivo and prolonged the survival time of HCC-bearing PDX mice. This study indicates that HCC PDX model is a good platform to testify the efficacy of preclinical chemotherapy and immunotherapy.