In addition to clinical use, the efficiency of a targeted sequencing approach can also be exploited for pre-clinical drug development. The expansion and maintenance of primary tumors as xenografts in immuno-suppressed mice is commonly used in cancer research to study potential targets and evaluate therapies in a physiological context. However, the xenografting process is not neutral and can select subpopulations of cells with certain growth advantages. Enabling the comparison of the mutational profile of matched xenograft and primary tumor samples, targeted sequencing can be used to query the validity of the xenograft model.
