Editorial: Current Status and Recent Advances in Preclinical Models for Rare Cancers

Ewa Krawczyk^1*Luciane R Cavalli²Joanna Kitlinska³

• ¹Department of Pathology, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, United States
• ²Instituto de Pesquisa Pele Pequeno Principe, Curitiba, Brazil
• ³Department of Biochemistry and Molecular & Cellular Biology, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, United States

Editorial: Current Status and Recent Advances in Preclinical Models for Rare Cancers Ewa Krawczyk, Luciane Cavalli, Joanna Kitlinska Despite advancements in diagnostic and successful therapies, cancer still poses an important threat to human health. Global burden of oncological diseases is significant -according to WHO, recently above 20 million new cases are diagnosed and more than 9 million people die per year because of various malignancies. Moreover, due to multiple factors, including aging of the societies, the number of cancer cases is predicted to increase in the near future. Therefore, all initiatives aimed at designing new diagnostic methods or novel therapeutic approaches are valuable and critically needed.Preclinical assays, both in vitro and in vivo, remain a crucial part of cancer research. They are indispensable in every aspect of basic and translational medicine, from drug screening and repurposing, vaccine development, to researching the mechanisms of the disease. However, no preclinical model is perfect, and none of them recapitulates exactly the physiology and pathophysiology of a human organism.For example, cell culture models in vitro lack the complexity of heterogenic cancer structure and cellular composition, so using them to test interactions of cancer cells with microenvironment and immune system is challenging. As an alternative, three-dimensional preclinical models can be utilized for that purpose, although they are limited by a high cost and low-throughput. Conversely, animal models in vivo retain more relevance to humans, but they are not time and cost efficient, and ethical issues have been raised against them.Nevertheless, preclinical disease models are important for cancer research, and there is an urgent need for the advancement in this area and development of new reliable methods. These new methods and techniques can facilitate research for commonly occurring cancers, but they are probably even more important for rare malignancies. Rare cancers research, due to their infrequent occurrence, limited availability of human tissues and scarce preclinical models, is especially challenging and can be often neglected. Therefore, an advancement in this area is essential. This edition of Research Topic is a collection of research and review articles demonstrating the importance of various types of preclinical models in rare cancers research. Three of them focus on sarcomas, emphasizing the difficulties in diagnosis and insufficient treatment options for these diseases. Altogether, excellent research and review articles collected in this Research topic clearly demonstrate the current status as well as exciting advancements in rare cancers modeling, that may greatly facilitate and accelerate the development of new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches for these challenging malignancies.