Intravital Optical Bioimaging of Ovarian Cancer Using a Luminescent Cell Line

Intravital bioimaging based on luminescence is an important method for the development and testing of antitumor drugs on model animals and is an essential part of preclinical studies. Bioimaging based on luminescent systems, compared with fluorescent bioimaging, provides a high signal-to-noise ratio, which justifies the development of cell lines that stably express luciferase genes for their subsequent use in model animals. In this work, we describe the creation of a stable cell line SKOV3.ip1-NanoLuc constitutively expressing the NanoLuc luciferase gene. The developed cell line was shown to be effective for intravital luminescence bioimaging of immunodeficient animals with deep-seated intraperitoneal tumors, which can be considered as a model of late-stage ovarian cancer.