Generation of Mouse Thyroid Calcitonin-producing Cell Tumors from Primary Mouse Tumors

Abstract

Medullary thyroid cancers (MTCs) are derived from calcitonin-producing cells (C cells) of neuroendocrine origin. Rb heterozygous mice develop low-grade C cell adenocarcinoma following biallelic inactivation of the Rb tumor suppressor gene loci. Additional inactivation of another tumor suppressor gene such as Trp53, Arf or Cdkn1a allows Rb-deficient mice to generate more aggressive C cell adenocarcinoma (Takahashi et al., 2006; Shamma et al., 2009; Kitajima et al., 2015). To characterize C cell adenocarcinoma cells derived from Rb-deficient mice of different genetic backgrounds, we attempted to extract C cell adenocarcinoma cells from primary thyroid tumor tissue. Since primary mouse small cell lung cancer (SCLC) cells those originate in neuroendocrine cells that also stems C cells, can be established both as non-adhesive and adhesive cells (Calbo et al., 2011), we applied their method to MTCs. Here we describe our isolation technique for non-adhesive and adhesive cell cultures from primary medullary thyroid tumor tissue. We found that the molecular markers of C cell such as Calcitonin and Ascl1 are predominantly enriched in the non-adhesive population (Kitajima et al., 2015). This is in line with the fact that one of most commonly distributed human MTC cell line TT is non-adhesive.