Establishment and characterization of human cell lines from a serous papillary adenocarcinoma of the endometrium.

Two cell lines, SPAC-1-L and SPAC-1-S, derived from a human serous papillary endometrial adenocarcinoma, have been established and repetitively subcultured as a monolayer culture for over 3 years through 144 passage generations. Each of the two cell lines is a subline derived from one original tumor. They have been independently subcultured from the primary culture dishes without any attempt to clone subpopulations and were further characterized with regard to morphology, growth kinetics, tumor marker production, karyotype, and tumorigenicity. These studies indicated that the SPAC-1-L and -S cell lines are different from each other in some cell properties such as morphological character, growth kinetics, and tumor marker productions. Compared with cell lines from a serous papillary endometrial carcinoma that has been previously reported in the literature, our two cell lines are more tumorigenic on nude mice (100%), which possibly correlates with the unusually aggressive biological behavior of the original tumor. In addition, implanted nude mouse tumors, especially the tumor derived from SPAC-1-S cells, retained many characteristics of the original tumor and histologically closely resembled the original serous papillary adenocarcinoma. Since serous papillary carcinoma is a clinically aggressive histological variant of endometrial adenocarcinoma with a significantly poor prognosis, these SPAC-1-L and -S cell lines should prove useful in future studies of the extremely aggressive biological behavior and unique morphology of this tumor.