title: A Protocol for Rapid Post-mortem Cell Culture of Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG).
abstract: Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG) is a childhood brainstem tumor that carries a universally fatal prognosis. Because surgical resection is not a viable treatment strategy and biopsy is not routinely performed, the availability of patient samples for research is limited. Consequently, efforts to study this disease have been challenged by a paucity of faithful disease models. To address this need, we describe here a protocol for the rapid processing of post-mortem autopsy tissue samples in order to generate durable patient-derived cell culture models that can be used in in vitro assays or in vivo orthotopic xenograft experiments. These models can be used to screen for potential drug targets and to study fundamental pathobiological processes within DIPG. This protocol can further be extended to analyze and isolate tumor and microenvironmental cells using Fluorescence-activated Cell Sorting (FACS), which enables subsequent analysis of gene expression, protein expression, or epigenetic modifications of DNA at the bulk cell or single cell level. Finally, this protocol can also be adapted to generate patient-derived cultures for other central nervous system tumors.
authors.affiliation: Graduate Program in Neuroscience, Department of Neurology, Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine.
authors.forename: Grant L
authors.initials: GL
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.affiliation: Departments of Neurology, Neurosurgery, Pathology and Pediatrics, Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine; mmonje@stanford.edu.
authors.forename: Michelle
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Monje
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001344:Autopsy; D020295:Brain Stem Neoplasms / Q000473:pathology*; D018929:Cell Culture Techniques; D002648:Child; D005434:Flow Cytometry; D005910:Glioma / Q000473:pathology*; D006801:Humans; D011149:Pons