Brain Metastasis Cell Lines Panel: a public resource for organotropic cell lines.
Valiente M et al. Cancer Research. (2020).
Protocol to generate murine organotypic brain cultures for drug screening and evaluation of anti-metastatic efficacy
Lucía Zhu, Lauritz Miarka, Patricia Baena, María Perea-García, Manuel Valiente. STAR Protocols (2023)
Information included in the BrMPanel includes the use and applications of brain metastatic cancer cells.
The investment on brain metastasis does not represent the tremendous unmet clinical need that many patients are suffering every day. Thus, it is key to develop better experimental models to keep learning about the fascinating biology underlying the complexity of metastatic colonization of the brain so we can target it more effectively. We want to participate in the development of better models that would include relevant aspects that are critical to model more accurately the many ways in which brain metastases could be manifested in the patient. Modelling metastatic cancer still relies on the generation of cancer cell lines that upon injection into mouse models recapitulate the ability to target specific organs. These cancer cell lines could even be enriched for increasing their specificity to one organ of interest, such as the brain. Brain metastatic cell lines have been used over the last decades as the most valuable resource for developing research projects on this subject, yet a detail analysis on how many of them exist was lacking.
Multiple laboratories joint efforts in 2020 to create the BrMPanel, a resource providing information on existing brain metastasis models. This working group including researchers around the world wrote a manuscript and created a webpage that could be used as a white paper for brain metastasis research. With this open resource we aimed to facilitate the access to these basic reagents, to avoid unnecessary efforts duplicating cell lines, as well as to identify specific types of cancer poorly represented among existing models.
This consortium is open to new members who want to share their newly established models of brain metastasis. Additionally, we continue to improve the characterization of these experimental models by incorporating omic approaches.
We have established 91 models of brain metastasis from mouse, rat and human representing multiple primary sources mainly lung cancer, breast cancer and melanoma. We report the do and don´t in brain metastasis research as well as recognize the limitations that we are facing experimentally. We decided to establish and open and pro-active working group that welcome new contributions to the BrMPanel as well as continue to improve the characterization of these models.
We hope this effort will promote research on brain metastasis as well as contribute towards the characterization of existing models. Our intention is to make this info available to the research community to move forward in our common goal of improving the treatment for this unmet clinical need.
