About

Patient-derived cancer models have become an essential tool in both cancer research, drug development and preclinical studies. Each model type - PDX, organoid and cell line - offers unique advantages and is better suited for specific research areas.

Researchers, clinicians, bioinformaticians and analytical tool developers face the challenge of navigating a complex landscape to find suitable models and associated data across multiple commercial and academic resources without the benefit of shared data standards or interoperable data. CancerModels.Org aims to solve this problem by providing harmonized and integrated model attributes to support consistent searching across the originating resources.

CancerModels.Org builds on the success of the PDX Finder resource PMID:30535239 and PDX Minimal information standard (PDX-MI, PMID: 29092942). PDX-MI has become established in the community for data exchange, adopted by the PDX providers, consortia and informatic tools integrating PDX data.

We are working with the community on Minimal Information standards for other patient-derived cancer models in an effort to make all datasets adhere to the FAIR data principles.

Our code is freely available under an Apache 2.0 license. All model and data submissions are made available under CC0 or EMBL-EBI terms of use. This work is supported by NCI U24 CA204781, U24 CA253539, and R01 CA089713.

We’d love to hear from you! To provide feedback or ask a question please contact CancerModels.Org team on helpdesk@cancermodels.org Found a bug or have a feature request? Send us an email or add it directly to our Github repository.

How to cite

If you use CancerModels.Org in your work, please cite our publication:

PDCM Finder: an open global research platform for patient-derived cancer models. Nucleic Acids Res. 2022 doi: 10.1093/nar/gkac1021. PMID: 36399494.

If you use PDX-MI in your work, please cite our publication:

PDX-MI: Minimal Information for Patient-Derived Tumor Xenograft Models. Cancer Res. 2017 doi: 10.1158/0008-5472.CAN-17-0582. PMID: 29092942; PMCID: PMC5738926.

Contact

You can contact us via email or make use of our contact form.

Licence

All cancermodels.org model and data submissions are available under CC0 or EMBL-EBI terms of use. Since 1st January 2023, we have been asking model providers to agree to share their data under the terms of CC0. This dedicates the data to the public domain, allowing downstream users to consume the data without restriction. Metadata and data submitted prior to 1 January 2023 are made available under the EMBL-EBI terms of use. Whilst these terms do not themselves impose any restrictions on downstream use, the application of CC0 licence removes any ambiguity. We advise users of cancermodels.org to note the licence terms of individual datasets, if applicable to their specific use case. The licence terms are accessible from the individual model pages. Please ensure that the original data are cited whenever they are used in a publication.