Establishing short term cultures from human brain tumours and metastases to analyze reduction of cell proliferation by antitumoural drugs

We established a cultivation method for tumour cells derived from operative specimens of human brain tumours of different WHO grades as well as brain metastases. Until now 62 tumour specimens were obtained at the time of craniotomy directly in the OR. These samples were processed to single cell suspensions and plated out. We succeeded in maintaining 65% of these cultures growing over a period of 4–8 weeks. These cultures grew to a sufficient number to allow freezing them for storage and performing different experiments. Meningioma cells showed a stellate-shaped morphology with few long branches, whereas glioblas…