Derivation and Genetic Validation of Clear Cell Renal Cell Carcinoma Cell Lines and Characterization of Their Growth Requirements

While extirpative surgery is curative for localized clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC), many patients develop recurrences or present with metastatic disease. Several aspects of ccRCC biology have been investigated, but these have been done in cell lines, which are known to poorly represent the tumour. Since cell lines are amenable to a wide array of experimental testing, the studies presented here demonstrate a novel method to generate ccRCC cell lines from primary tumours, which increases the rate of primary tumour cell line generation four fold. Additionally, ccRCC cells do not grow in serum-free media, which has been shown to be beneficial in other cancers. Therefore, we interrogated the effect of exogenous growth factors to optimize our serum-free media growth conditions, among which TGFb1 appeared to elicit the largest mitogenic effect. Once optimized, these findings will provide a valuable tool for understanding ccRCC tumour cell biology and identifying therapeutic targets.MAS