Bruce Chabner, M.D.
Former Director, DCTD

The whole concept of demonstrating a drug's activity in a mouse is very valuable. And actually, many of the concepts that we now depend on in terms of clinical trial designs, schedule, integration of information about pharmacokinetics and trying to maximize tumor cell kill and minimize host toxicity grew out of these studies.

Howard Skipper was a key person in doing this. But they were using animal tumors. And they were using tumors which in many ways were not like the human tumors that we're using. So they weren't terribly predictive of activity. They did provide a way of being sure that a tumor had potential anti-tumor activity in a living system. But they didn't guarantee success in man. And they seemed best at predicting for activity in lymphomas and leukemias and other rapidly growing tumors and least predictive for solid tumors.