Experimental animal models of pancreatic carcinogenesis and liver metastasis and me-tastasis-related molecules / 中国肿瘤临床

ABSTRACT

Objective: To develop a reliable model of pancreatic carcinogenesis and liver metastasis in mice and preliminarily analyze metastasis-related molecules. Methods: Liver metastasis models of pancreatic cancer were made by injecting murine Panc-2 cells in the spleens of 12 C57/BL6 mice. Six mice in the control group were injected with phosphate buffered saline. Liver metastases were de-tected pathologically in the experimental group. Quantitative real-time PCR was used to analyze the variation in the expression levels of metastasis-related molecules in the tumor tissue located in the spleen, metastatic tumor tissues in the liver, and liver tissue adja-cent to metastatic carcinoma. Results: In the experimental group, the incidence rate of liver metastasis was 83.33%. An anatomical study showed that there was a single giant tumor nodule at every injection site in the spleen, while multiple nodular metastases ap-peared in the livers of 10 mice, with the liver tumorigenesis rate 83.33%. The pathological results indicated that the tumor cell pattern of liver metastasis was in accordance with pancreatic adenocarcinoma. CCL-17, CCL-22, CD44, and other molecules had higher impres-sion levels in the metastatic tumor tissues in the liver and the tumor tissue of spleen than in the liver tissue adjacent to metastatic car-cinoma. Expression levels of Ang-2, BAK, BAx, and other molecules were higher in the liver tissue adjacent to metastatic carcinoma, and the relative expression level of gene was more than 1 (P<0.05). Conclusions: Intrasplenic injection of pancreatic cancer cells suc-cessfully developed a model of liver metastasis that partly mimicked the natural metastatic process, which showed variations in the ex-pression levels of metastasis-related molecules similar to that in the human body. This is a reliable method to produce pancreatic can-cer liver metastasis in mice and may be valuable in experimental studies for screening anti-tumor durgs.