Utility of endoscopic ultrasound-guided fine-needle aspiration for preclinical evaluation of therapies in cancer.

Abstract

Personalising cancer therapy is a way of improving treatment efficacy, by selecting specific treatments for patients with certain molecular changes to their tumour. This requires both molecular material to detect these targets and a preclinical disease model to demonstrate treatment efficacy. In pancreatic cancer this is problematic, as most patients present with advanced disease and are therefore ineligible for surgery. As a result, biological material derived from such patients has been excluded from all preclinical studies in personalised medicine. This chapter presents methodology to achieve both of the above-mentioned requirements using endoscopic ultrasound-guided fine-needle aspiration, which can be offered to nearly all patients with early or advanced disease.Copyright © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.