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Updated: Mar 1, 2026

Isolation of Salivary Epithelial Cells from Human Salivary Glands for In Vitro Growth as Salispheres or Monolayers
Published on: July 15, 2019
Establishment and genomic characterization of primary salivary duct carcinoma cell line
Jie Li1, Yohitsugu Mitani1, Pulivarthi H Rao2
1The University of Texas, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Department of Pathology, United States.
Objectives:
To develop and characterize in vitro salivary duct carcinoma as a surrogate for functional studies.
Materials And Methods:
Cells were dispersed from tumor tissue fragments under sterile conditions in RPMI media. Disassociated cells were cultivated, immortalized with hTERT and propagated for more than 100 passages. Morphologic, linage, cytogenetic and genomic analyses were performed on different passages of cell line and primary tumor. Soft agar growth was performed.
Results:
Analysis of cytomorphologic features, growth characteristics and lineage specific markers expression confirmed the epithelial derivation and the neoplastic nature of the cell line. DNA STRs analysis showed identical match of both cell line and primary tumor. Cultivated cells expressed Androgen Receptor (AR), PTEN, and EFGR proteins and the AR-V7 isoform transcript. Comparative exome-sequencing identified common mutated genes in both cell line and primary tumor. In-vitro colony formation of late passages is established.
Conclusion:
We report the development of the first human salivary duct carcinoma cell line (MDA-SDC-04) that retains critical biological and genomic features of the donor tumor.

