Objectives: 

To study the thyroid diseases we can use: animals, cell lines from normal thyroid as FRTL-5 and PCCl3 derive from rat or established human lines from thyroid tumors or normal thyroid obtained by transformation, sold by several international banks, without confirmation on their phenotype (ARO, FRO, DRO, KAT-4). Many of the lines are listed in NIH-panels which measure the effects toxic/apoptotic/antiproliferative and preclinical mandatory requirement for any molecule/drug that will be applied to humans. Recently, it has been proved that many of this cell lines were not from thyroid (Schhweppe, JClinInvest 2008). In this study we want to improve conditions in culture medium actually defined for thyroid primary culture, by adding some componets and modifying other presents in the thyroid environment to ensure the maintenance of thyroid phenotype (patent pending).

Materials: 

For over ten years, our group have developped the BANTTIC (Bank of Thyroid Tumors in Culture), generating many human follicular cell cultures from surgical samples of patients (confirming by STRs their thyroid tumor procedence) as Normal Thyroid, Mulinodular goiter, Follifular adenoma, papillary carcinoma and Metastase. Through a strict standardization (PCR or IF) we guarantee the maintainance of the thyroid phenotype. The culture medium used until now, allows cells to express the thyroid phenotype but, this expresion is at low levels when compared with thyroid tissue. However this expression is comparable with commercial cell lines expression.

Results: 

We have obtained a culture medium that allows slow cellular growth into epithelial-like structures follicles very similar to real thyroid cells. We found high expression and cellular localization of phenotypic markers characteristic of each thyroid disease: TG, TPO, TTF-1, NIS or pendrin.

Conclusions: 

We have established a high specific culture media for Thyroid primary culture that allows cells to grow as in their own tissue, expressing all the thyroids specific genes.