Over 70 patient-derived pancreatic and colorectal tumor models, generated in Verona, characterized, and made available to the international scientific community. This is the contribution of the ARC-Net Centre for Applied Research on Cancer at the University of Verona to the Human Cancer Models Ini…
Over 70 patient-derived pancreatic and colorectal tumor models, generated in Verona, characterized, and made available to the international scientific community. This is the contribution of the ARC-Net Centre for Applied Research on Cancer at the University of Verona to the Human Cancer Models Initiative (HCMI), the major international project that, over the course of ten years, has contributed to the creation of one of the largest collections of patient-derived cancer models ever assembled. The results have been published in the journal Nature.
The collection includes models of numerous types of cancer, including pancreatic, breast, endometrial, colorectal, bladder, ovarian, lung, and head and neck cancers. Complete clinical data are available for 522 models; 153 involve rare cancers, and 71 come from participants of non-European ancestry. Samples from the original tumors are also available, along with advanced molecular profiles, including DNA and RNA sequencing and transcriptomic and epigenetic data.
The Verona center participated in the initiative as the Italian subsite of the Cancer Model Development Center coordinated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the United States. The Italian site was co-led by Aldo Scarpa, Professor of Pathological Anatomy at the University of Verona and founder of ARC-Net, and Vincenzo Corbo, professor in the Department of Engineering for Innovative Medicine and director of the University’s PhD School.
A central component of the project is represented by tumor organoids, three-dimensional structures derived from patients’ tissues and grown in the laboratory. Unlike traditional two-dimensional cell lines, organoids can preserve many of the genetic and biological characteristics of the tumors from which they originate, providing researchers with models that more accurately represent the disease.
These systems make it possible to study how cancer cells grow and adapt, identify the mechanisms underlying their survival, and analyze their response to treatments. The ability to expand the models over time, characterize them in depth, and distribute them to other laboratories also transforms a sample obtained from a single patient into a shared, reusable resource for the international scientific community.
The expertise developed in Verona in this field also stems from a research career that began in the United States. During his research work in David Tuveson’s laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, Corbo contributed to the development of pancreatic organoid culture technologies. Upon returning to Italy, this experience was transferred and further developed within ARC-Net, where it was integrated with the center’s expertise in tumor pathology and molecular characterization.
The collaborative dimension is one of the project’s central elements. HCMI has brought together researchers, clinicians, and research institutions from several countries. The contribution from Verona was developed in close collaboration with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Northwell Health, and the Hubrecht Institute, together with the other partners in the international consortium. This network integrated academic research, translational medicine, and clinical care, enabling patient samples to be transformed into shared models that can be used by the scientific community worldwide.
“Participation in this international project demonstrates the value of collaboration between basic research, translational research, and clinical activity,” says Vincenzo Corbo. “The strength of the Verona model lies precisely in its ability to bring together different fields and institutions, united by the goal of better understanding tumor biology and developing increasingly effective tools for the medicine of the future.”
“The most important outcome of this project,” Corbo continues, “is not simply that we produced more than 70 models in Verona, but that we transformed them into a shared resource. I still remember sending the first models to the international repositories: it was the moment when the goal of years of work became tangible. Today, these same models are being used by research groups in different parts of the world to address questions that we could not have anticipated when the project began. That is precisely the purpose of a scientific infrastructure of this kind.”
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10806-y
Sara Mauroner
