Establishment of cell lines with high and low metastatic potential from A549 human lung adenocarcinoma

This article reports the establishment of variant cell lines with high and low metastatic potential by the dilution plating technique. Two clones with high metastatic potential, 2S Lu-4 and 11S Lu-1 and two clones with low metastatic potential, 8S and 165 were established from A549 human lung adenocarcinoma. The high-metastatic cell lines produced enhanced lung metastases, but the low-metastatic cell lines did not produce lung metastasis after injection into the tail vein of 5-week-old BALB/c nude mice. The primary tumors produced by the two high-metastatic cells grew fast and showed enhanced angiogenesis. The high-metastatic cells were small and flat-shaped, while the low-metastatic cells were large and flat-shaped. When the four variant cell lines and original A549 cells were embedded in collagen gels, the colonies of 2S Lu-4, 11S Lu-1 and A549 grew actively, whereas almost of all the colonies of 8S and 165 did not survive after 35 days in culture. These four cloned cell lines originated from heterogeneous populations of the parental,1549 cells should be an excellent tool for studying the process of metastasis of lung cancer.