Pancreatic cancer (PC) remains a highly lethal cancer, which still requires profound clinical and preclinical research. The predictive power of patient-derived xenograft (PDX) model determines that it will become an important tool for preclinical and clinical research. PDX is not only widely used in preclinical studies of PC drugs, but also can be used to predict the result of human clinical trials. The PDX model and the corresponding patients' co-clinical trial can quickly obtain the drug response, optimize the combination, explore drug resistance mechanisms, and screen for biomarkers. Meanwhile, PDX can be used for personalized medicine as patient's avatar model. With the development of novel PDX models: patient-derived orthotopic xenografts (PDOX) model, humanized PDX model and CTC-derived PDX model, cooperation of various research teams is needed to build PDX encyclopedia of PC.
Keywords: Patient-derived xenograft (PDX); clinical research; pancreatic cancer (PC).