The avian chorioallantoic membrane as an alternative tool to study medullary thyroid cancer

• Main Authors: Nassim Ghaffari-Tabrizi-Wizsy, Christina Angelika Passegger, Laura Nebel, Fabian Krismer, Gudrun Herzer-Schneidhofer, Gert Schwach, Roswitha Pfragner
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bioscientifica 2019-04-01
• Series: Endocrine Connections
• Subjects: medullary thyroid carcinoma; endocrine cancers; precilinal trials; 3R
• Online Access: https://ec.bioscientifica.com/view/journals/ec/8/5/EC-18-0431.xml

Preclinical trials of medullary thyroid cancer (MTC) therapeutics require both in vitro and in vivo analyses. Human tumour xenografted rodent models, which are considered the ‘gold standard’ to study and validate the efficacy and toxicity of lead compounds before translation to clinical trials, are very expensive, subject to organismal variability and ethical controversies. The avian chorioallantoic membrane (CAM) assay provides an alternative versatile, cost-effective and ethically less objectionable short-term, in vivo model for reliable screening of drugs. In this work, we grafted two MTC cell lines and patient-derived MTC tumour samples onto the avian CAM and characterised the resulted tumours histologically and immunohistochemically. Our findings provide the evidence that the CAM assay is a suitable model for studying the pathophysiology of MTC and can even be used as in vivo system for drug testing.