For generations, the tools scientists used to study cancer in the laboratory were blunt instruments — cell lines decades old, grown flat in dishes, bearing little resemblance to the living tumors they were meant to represent. Over the past ten years, an international consortium anchored at MIT, the Broad Institute, and Dana-Farber has quietly worked to change this, assembling nearly 700 patient-derived cancer models spanning 25 tumor types and making them freely available to researchers everywhere. The effort, published in Nature, is less a discovery than an act of collective infrastructure —