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An in vitro method to select malignant cells from surgical biopsies of breast cancer patients
Biological Procedures Online volume 7, pages 8–16 (2005)
Abstract
To date, breast cancer (BC) research is mainly studied with cell lines. These cells were passaged multiple times, acquiring phenotypes, additional mutations and epigenetic changes. These changes make the passaged cell lines different from the original malignancy. Thus cell lines, although useful as models could be improved with additional studies with primary BC. It is difficult to obtain malignant cells from breast tissues without contamination from surrounding healthy cells. Selection and expansion of malignant cells from surgical tissues have proved to be daunting tasks. This study describes a reliable and reproducible method for isolating and expanding malignant cells from surgical breast tissues. The method uses co-cultures with BM stroma to select for the cancer cells while the healthy cells undergo rapid cell death. Studies are described to show the cloning efficiencies and sensitivity of the method using surgical samples of varying sizes, different stages of BC, and samples from needle biopsies.
Abbreviations
- SDF-1α:
-
Stromal cell-derived factor 1α
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Open Access This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Corcoran, K.E., Patel, P.S. & Rameshwar, P. An in vitro method to select malignant cells from surgical biopsies of breast cancer patients. Biol. Proced. Online 7, 8–16 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1251/bpo100
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1251/bpo100