Researchers at Monash University, Australia have established one of the world’s largest collections of living tumours from prostate cancer patients, accelerating the testing of new treatments for prostate cancer and leading to faster patient benefit.

With the establishment of the Melbourne Urological Research Alliance (MURAL), hundreds of Victorian men have generously donated samples of their cancer tissue, enabling the team to study a greater diversity of live tumours and test the efficacy of a larger variety of therapies for their ability to stop tumour growth.

The PDX collection (patient-derived xenografts) now comprises 59 tumours, collected from 30 patients between 2012 - 2020 and is now one of the largest collections of prostate cancer models in the world.

MURAL PDXs are an enduring resource of new cancer models that can be shared with other academic investigators or pharmaceutical companies.  The patients and their families are directly embedded in this venture, including the EJ Whitten Foundation who have been pivotal over the last 10 years in providing over $1M in donations enabling this resource to be developed and the program to come to the forefront of the international field.