ESTABLISHMENT AND CHARACTERIZATION OF 2 PEDIATRIC BRAIN-TUMOR CELL-LINES IN-VITRO

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.