Abstract 1673: Conservation of copy number profiles during engraftment and passaging of patient-derived cancer xenografts
Authors: Woo Xing Yi , Giordano Jessica , Srivastava Anuj , Zhao Zi-Ming , Lloyd Michael W. , de Bruijn Roebi , Suh Yun-Suhk , Kim Jong-Il , Yang Han-Kwang , Lee Charles , Dean Dennis A. , Davis-Dusenbery Brandi , Evrard Yvonne A. , Doroshow James H. , Welm Alana L. , Welm Bryan , Lewis Michael T. , Fang Bingliang , Roth Jack A. , Meric-Bernstam Funda , Herlyn Meenhard , Davies Michael , Ding Li , Li Shunqiang , Govindan Ramaswamy , Isella Claudio , Moscow Jeffrey A. , Trusolino Livio , Byrne Annette , Jonkers Jos , Bult Carol J. , Medico Enzo , Chuang Jeffrey H. ,   PDXNET consortium & EurOPDX consortium
Published: September 2020

Patient-derived xenografts (PDXs) are resected human tumors engrafted into mice for preclinical studies and therapeutic testing. It has been proposed that the mouse host affects tumor evolution during PDX engraftment and propagation, which could impact the capacity of PDXs for faithful modeling of patient treatment response. Such results contrast with reports that have observed genomic fidelity of PDX models with respect to the originating patient tumors and from early to late passages by direct DNA measurements (DNA sequencing or SNP arrays).

Here we resolve these contradicting observations by systematically evaluating CNA changes and the genes they affect during engraftment and passaging in a large, internationally collected set of PDX models, comparing both RNA and DNA-based approaches. The data collected, as part of the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) PDXNet (PDX Development and Trial Centers Research Network) Consortium and EurOPDX consortium, comprises 1548 patient (PT) and PDX datasets (1451 unique samples) from 509 models derived from American, European and Asian cancer patients, spanning across 16 tumor types. By assessing copy number changes by pairwise (PT-PDX or PDX-PDX) correlation and residual analysis to control for systematic biases, our study demonstrates that prior reports of systematic copy number divergence between PTs and PDXs are incorrect, and confirms the high retention of copy number during PDX engraftment and passaging. Moreover, only a small proportion of models show large CNA discordance between the samples, suggesting that the variations observed in PDX are mainly due to rare clonal selection of individual tumors rather than murine pressures.

This large scale data analysis also reveals several other findings that clarify the evolutionary process in PDXs. We do observe larger deviations between PT-PDX than in PDX-PDX comparisons, likely due to dilution of PT signal by human stromal cells. Interestingly, we found that a major contributor to the differences between PDX samples is lineage-specific drift associated with splitting of tumors into fragments during PDX propagation. We observed no significant enrichment of cancer-related genes in PDX-specific CNAs across models, suggesting the lack of systematic copy number evolution driven by the PDX mouse host. Moreover, CNA differences between patient and PDX tumors were comparable to variations in multi-region tumor samples or intra-patient samples. Thus concerns about the genetic stability of the PDX system are likely to be less important than the spatial heterogeneity of solid tumors themselves. This result is consistent with our results on lineage effects during passaging, which indicate that intratumoral spatial evolution is the major reason for genetic drift.

Our in-depth tracking of CNAs throughout PDX engraftment and passaging confirms that tumors engrafted and passaged in PDX models maintain a high degree of molecular fidelity to the original patient tumors and their suitability for pre-clinical drug testing. This work also finely enumerates the copy number profiles in hundreds of publicly available models, which will enable researchers to assess the suitability of each for individualized treatment studies.

Citation Format: Xing Yi Woo, Jessica Giordano, Anuj Srivastava, Zi-Ming Zhao, Michael W. Lloyd, Roebi de Bruijn, Yun-Suhk Suh, Jong-Il Kim, Han-Kwang Yang, Charles Lee, Dennis A. Dean, Brandi Davis-Dusenbery, Yvonne A. Evrard, James H. Doroshow, Alana L. Welm, Bryan Welm, Michael T. Lewis, Bingliang Fang, Jack A. Roth, Funda Meric-Bernstam, Meenhard Herlyn, Michael Davies, Li Ding, Shunqiang Li, Ramaswamy Govindan, Claudio Isella, Jeffrey A. Moscow, Livio Trusolino, Annette Byrne, Jos Jonkers, Carol J. Bult, Enzo Medico, Jeffrey H. Chuang, PDXNET consortium & EurOPDX consortium. Conservation of copy number profiles during engraftment and passaging of patient-derived cancer xenografts [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research 2020; 2020 Apr 27-28 and Jun 22-24. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2020;80(16 Suppl):Abstract nr 1673.