Profiling the evolution of human metastatic bladder cancer.

Pulmonary metastases frequently develop in patients with aggressive bladder cancer, yet investigation of this process at the molecular level suffers from the poor availability of human metastatic tumor tissue and the absence of suitable animal models. To address this, we developed progressively more metastatic human bladder cancer cell lines and an in vivo bladder-cancer lung-metastasis model, and we successfully used these to identify genes of which the expression levels change according to the degree of pulmonary metastatic potential. By initially intravenously injecting the poorly metastatic T24T human urothelial cancer cells into nude mice, and then serially reintroducing and reisolating the human tumor cells from the resultant mouse lung tumors, three derivative human lines with increasingly metastatic phenotypes, designated FL1, FL2, and FL3, were sequentially isolated.

Cellular interactions in the tropism of prostate cancer to bone.

At autopsy >or=80% of prostate cancers have established macrometastases in marrow containing bone. The mechanism(s) to explain this remarkable level of bone involvement remain to be elucidated. We examined the adhesive and invasive behavior of prostate cancer cells to osteoblastic and human bone marrow endothelial cells (HBME-1) in an attempt to explain the tropism of prostate cells for bone.