Establishment and characterization of human metastatic hepatocellular carcinoma cell line

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most common malignancies worldwide with a poor prognosis. Recently, we established a HCC cell line from a metastatic HCC tumor. GTG banding analysis was performed and the karyotype showed that this metastatic HCC cell line is a hypertriploid (71-78 chromosomes) with a large marker chromosome containing a long homogeneously staining region (hsr). Comparative genomic hybridization was applied to characterize the chromosomal alterations in this metastatic HCC cell line. The results showed that the hsr was composed of amplified DNA sequences from 11q13. Further characterization of the hsr may lead to the isolation of the putative amplified oncogene at 11q13.