In vitro methods to culture primary human breast epithelial cells

Current evidence suggests that much like leukemia, breast tumors are maintained by a small subpopulation of tumor cells that have stem cell properties. These cancer stem cells are envisaged to be responsible for tumor formation and relapse. Therefore, knowledge about their nature will provide a platform to develop therapies to eliminate these breast cancer stem cells. This concept highlights the need to understand the mechanisms that regulate the normal functions of the breast stem cells and their immediate progeny as alterations to these same mechanisms can cause these primitive cells to act as cancer stem cells. The study of the primitive cell functions relies on the ability to isolate them from primary sources of breast tissue. This chapter describes processing of discarded tissue from reduction mammoplasty samples as sources of normal primary human breast epithelial cells and describes cell culture systems to grow single-cell suspensions prepared from these reduction samples in vitro.