Hk. Rooprai et al., ESTABLISHMENT AND CHARACTERIZATION OF 2 PEDIATRIC BRAIN-TUMOR CELL-LINES IN-VITRO, Anticancer research, 17(6B), 1997, pp. 4127-4134
Well-characterised, established cell lines derived from paediatric bra
in tumours are rare. The paucity of medulloblastoma cell lines may ref
lect - at least in part - the differences in cell adhesion molecule ex
pression between the cells of primitive neoplasms of childhood and the
ir better- differentiated adult counterpart neoplasms. This frequently
results in primitive neoplastic cells failing to adhere to the cultur
e dish substrate and leads to suspension, rather than monolayer, growt
h. Furthermore, low grade astrocytic neoplasms of infancy, and early a
dulthood often have low mitotic indices and, accordingly, fail to esta
blish themselves in vitro. We report here the establishment and charac
terisation of a surface adherent medulloblastoma-derived cell line (IP
NN-8) from a 13 year old boy and a pilocytic astrocytoma of the hypoth
alamus-derived cell line (IPNT-H) from a 6 month old child which have
undergone 39 and 36 serial passages respectively. Growth curves and PC
NA staining results show that these cell lines have similar population
doubling times (24 hours and 27 hours respectively) and high prolifer
ative indices. Immunocytochemical analysis shows that the IPNN-8 cell
line is weakly positive for NFP and S-100 protein and negative for bot
h NSE and CD44 bur positive for A2B5 and GFAP, indicating glial differ
entiation; whereas, the IPNT-H cell line is positive for GFAP, glutami
ne synthetase, A2B5 and CD44 but only weakly positive for vimentin.