We are very proud to be a part of a joint, international effort to develop a genetically engineered mouse model (GEMM) for the understudied pediatric cancer, alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma (aRMS). This model, which has been deposited at JAX (strain 041178), will accelerate the development of living-saving therapies for children with aRMS. This model was developed as a joint undertaking by teams at the Children’s Cancer Therapy Development Institute (cc-TDI), the University of Utah, Ozgene and Gen-H.

This model harbors a conditionally activatable PAX7::FOXO1 oncogene, enabling the molecular biology of aRMS to be studied and therapies to be tested. The model was generated using OzBIG technology to create a targeted integration of 25 kb of sequence at the 3´ end of pax7. This precise delivery of a customized large genetic payload demonstrates the power of OzBIG gene targeting to create sophisticated GEMMs for disease modelling and therapy development.

You can read the paper describing the model here.