Objective: Cancer is the primary cause of death all over the world, despite of its early detection and novel therapies available. The process of cancer drug development is growing tremendously. With respect to many limitations in human studies, there is the need to develop experimental models for screening of efficacy and toxicity of developing drugs. The purpose of this study is to investigate the cancer model for drug development.

Materials and Methods: In this review, articles are extracted with selected keywords from the PubMed, SID, Springer, Medlib, Web of Science (Clarivate) and ScienceDirect databases without any language restrictions.

Results: The efforts to reduce global cancer burden are mainly focused on developing innovative diagnostic and therapeutic tools. A plenty of in vitro and in vivo models are utilized in cancer drug discovery process. Successful bench-to-bedside translation of basic scientific findings about cancer into therapeutic interventions for patients depends on the selection of appropriate experimental models for testing.

Conclusions: The presented models have both advantages and disadvantages. None of them are absolutely ideal while they are chosen according to the purpose of the investigator and the advantages of each method for cancer research.