Establishment and characterization of two paediatric brain tumour cell lines in vitro

Well-characterised, established cell lines derived from paediatric brain tumours are rare. The paucity of medulloblastoma cell lines may reflect--at least in part--the differences in cell adhesion molecule expression between the cells of primitive neoplasms of childhood and their better-differentiated adult counterpart neoplasms. This frequently results in primitive neoplastic cells failing to adhere to the culture dish substrate and leads to suspension, rather than monolayer, growth. Furthermore, low grade astrocytic neoplasms of infancy and early adulthood often have low mitotic indices and, accordingly, fail to establish themselves in vitro. We report here the establishment and characterisation of a surface adherent medulloblastoma-derived cell line (IPNN-8) from a 13 year old boy and a pilocytic astrocytoma of the hypothalamus-derived cell line (IPNT-H) from a 6 month old child which have undergone 39 and 36 serial passages respectively. Growth curves and PCNA staining results show that these cell lines have similar population doubling times (24 hours and 27 hours respectively) and high proliferative indices. Immunocytochemical analysis shows that the IPNN-8 cell line is weakly positive for NFP and S-100 protein and negative for both NSE and CD44 but positive for A2B5 and GFAP, indicating glial differentiation; whereas, the IPNT-H cell line is positive for GFAP, glutamine synthetase, A2B5 and CD44 but only weakly positive for vimentin.