A highly metastatic murine breast cancer cell line that provides an excellent mouse model for fundamental as well as therapeutic studies of human breast cancer metastasis.

Key Words: Cancer research, drug discovery 

DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION(S): The present invention is a highly metastatic murine breast cancer cell line derived from a spontaneous breast cancer in a C3H/HeJ strain female retired breeder mouse. The cell line was created and named C3L5 in 1988. It has since maintained its highly metastatic phenotype in spite of repeated passages over the last 17 year period. It is possibly the most aggressive mouse breast cancer cell line developed so far with ability for rapid spontaneous metastasis to distant organs, in particular the lungs, from the primary site, making it highly suitable for test cancer therapy in a mouse model. The cell line has never been genetically modified and therefore provides an excellent mouse model for fundamental as well as therapeutic studies of human breast cancer metastasis.

BACKGROUND: Cancer animal models and cell lines are of great value in cancer research and cancer drug discovery activities. Testing a potential cancer therapy on a well established and reliable cancer cell line is one critically important step in determining the therapeutic characteristic and value of the therapy. Among other criteria, a stably maintained ability for rapid spontaneous metastasis is an important and highly appreciated feature of a cancer cell line.  

POTENTIAL ADVANTAGES/USES: Other than the features discussed above, the C3L5 cell line also has the following advantages over other murine breast cancer cell lines tested in cancer research and cancer therapy development:  

• C3L5 has “immunogenic” capacity when tumor cells are killed in vivo. This property has led to a variety of “immunotherapy” protocols using the C3L5 breast cancer model.

• C3L5 was found to be most suited to test oncolytic adeno-viral vectors in syngeneic mouse models due to its high efficiency of adenovirus transduction after intra-tumoral injection. This has led to the discovery of a combined, adenovirus-mediated oncolytic and immuno-stimulatory tumor therapy.

DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE: Fully developed

Reference Number: UWO-AG-021 

Preclinical

This cell line is available for non-exclusive licensing.