Short Report
Unmasking epithelial-mesenchymal transition in a breast cancer primary culture: a study report
1 Institute of Molecular Bioimaging and Physiology (IBFM), National Council of Researches (CNR), Cefalù-Segrate, Italy
2 Laboratorio di Tecnologie Oncologiche (LATO) – HSR G.Giglio, Cefalù, Italy
3 Department of Surgery, San Raffaele G. Giglio Hospital, Cefalù, Italy
4 Division of Pathology, La Maddalena Hospital, Palermo, Italy
5 Department of Sciences and Biomedical Technologies, University of Milan, Milan, Italy
6 Milano-Bicocca University, Milan, Italy
7 Nuclear Medicine Center, San Gerardo, Monza, Italy
BMC Research Notes 2012, 5:343 doi:10.1186/1756-0500-5-343
Published: 3 July 2012Abstract
Background
Immortalized cancer cell lines are now well-established procedures in biomedicine for a more complete understanding of cellular processes in cancer. However, they are more useful in preparation of fresh tumour tissue, in order to obtain cancer cells with highly preserved individual tumour properties. In the present study we report an analytical investigation on a breast cancer primary cell culture isolated from a surgical specimen obtained from a patient with an infiltrating ductal carcinoma. The objective of the research was to reveal unrecognized aspects of neoplastic cells, typical of the tumour from where the cells were derived, but masked in fixed tissue sections, in order to better predict the aggressive potentiality of the tumour.
Findings
Using a combination of mechanical and enzymatic treatment, the tumour tissue was dissociated immediately after surgical removal. The primary cells were isolated by differential cell centrifugation and grown in selective media. Immunocytochemistry and quantitative RT-PCR analysis were performed to detect the presence of specific biomarkers at protein and transcript level.
The isolated primary breast cancer cells displayed phenotypic behaviour, characteristic of malignant cells and expression of several mesenchymal markers, revealing a strong signature for the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition associated to a stellate morphology with a number of cellular protrusions and the attitude to overgrow as multilayered overlapping cellular foci.
Conclusions
Our data are a further meaningful indication that primary cell cultures represent a powerful system that could be applied to those cases deserving a deeper investigation at molecular level in order to design individualized anticancer therapies in the future.
