Patient Derived Xenograft (PDX) Development and Trial Centers (PDTCs) Network (U54 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)

This funding opportunity announcement (FOA) requests applications for PDX (patient-derived xenografts) Development and Trial Centers (PDTCs) to serve as the laboratory research units of the PDX Development and Trial Centers Research Network (PDXNet). The PDXNet is a National Cancer Institute (NCI) program established to coordinate collaborative, large-scale development and pre-clinical testing of targeted therapeutic agents in patient-derived models (PDMs) to advance the vision of cancer precision medicine. The main goals for PDTCs include: develop and implement mechanism-based preclinical trials of drug combinations in large sets of molecularly characterized PDXs to advance cancer precision medicine through the therapeutic development of these agents, with a focus on NCI-IND agents; provide evidence-based recommendations for early phase clinical trials to be conducted in NCI clinical trial networks by identifying agent combinations that produce in vivo evidence of deep and durable responses of PDX models to the therapeutic intervention; develop and characterize new PDX models to share with the NCI Patient Derived Models Repository (PDMR) that fill identified resource gaps in the PDMR collection. This includes PDX models from patients with clinical drug resistance, models obtained from racial/ethnic minority populations, and models of rare cancers; engage collaboratively as a network to develop and apply metrics for preclinical in vivo drug response that improves the value of PDX drug response data in predicting clinical outcomes; advance the understanding of therapeutic outcome disparities by race/ethnicity to ensure that early phase clinical trials are well equipped to support diverse and equitable recruitment; and devise procedures and platforms to make preclinical PDX data broadly available to researchers across the cancer community, using PDTCs and NCI mutually agreed upon standards.