Invasiveness in vitro and biological markers in human primary glioblastomas

Invasion of spheroids from 20 human primary glioblastomas into precultured fetal rat brain tissue in culture has been studied and quantified. Between 30 and 98 percent of the normal brain tissue was destroyed by invading glio ma cells within 4 days. The degree of invasion did not correlate with patie nt survival. A slightly higher invasiveness and shorter survival was seen i n tumors with EGF receptor overexpression, and the opposite pattern was fou nd for tumors with a TP53 mutation. The degree of invasiveness in vitro was far higher than would be expected f rom the dynamics of clinically observed tumor spread. This suggests that me chanisms suppressing invasion may be operative in the normal brain; alterna tively the differences may be due to a higher permissiveness of the fetal b rain tissue for invasion in vitro.