Establishment and characterization of a continuous human basal cell carcinoma cell line from facial skin (I) cytological behavior of early passages.

Basal cell carcinomas (BCCs) are one of the most common skin malignant diseases of human beings in the course of a lifetime. BCC is a slow growing tumor of epithelial origin. Most of the BCC tumors have a normal diploid DNA configuration and have been successfully passaged for a short-term only. We now report a long-term culture (BCC-1/KMC) of human BCC derived from the undifferentiated type of facial BCC tumor on the thermal traumatic scar, which was aneuploidy and subculture for more than 100 passages. The population doubling time of BCC-1/KMC cells at the third passage was 38.86 hours. This immortalized and tumorigenic cell line expresses epithelial markers of keratin filaments and desmosomes. The genetic markers of this cell line have HLA-A2, A24, B27, B35, Cw3, DR2 and DR12. The BCC-1/KMC cells have successfully adapted to grow in a cheaper commercial medium (RPMI 1640) and at a moderate concentration of calcium (0.4 mM).