In March of 1996 the lab received a primary tumor specimen obtained following modified radical mastectomy of a 40 year old woman previously diagnosed with locally advanced, inflammatory breast cancer. Prior to surgery, the patient had undergone neoadjuvant chemotherapy using taxol and dexamethasone. The excised neoplasm was a 3.8 cm mass consisting of a poorly differentiated invasive carcinoma. The cells were negative for estrogen and progesterone receptor. There was peritumoral angio-lymphatic invasion consistent the the diagnosis of inflammatory breast cancer. The histologic grade was Bloom-Richardson Grade III.
Like SUM-149, the SUM-190 cells were isolated from a mastectomy specimen of a patient with locally advanced inflammatory breast cancer who had a poor response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Unlike SUM-149 however, the media that was used to develop the cell line was more complex, at least in early passages. By this time in the development of the SUM cell lines, the lab had developed several different media formulations all of which were tested on newly established primary cultures. One of those formulations was a serum-free medium supplemented with all of the factors that were routinely used as serum-replacement factors, plus insulin and hydrocortisone, and in this case lysophosphatidic acid (LPA). We began testing LPA-supplemented media because we had discovered when working with normal human mammary epithelial cells (HMEC) that cells of the luminal lineage required a factor present in serum in addition to the insulin, hydrocortisone, and EGF that would support the growth of basal epithelial cells, we found that LPA was indeed able to replace serum in this media and support growth of normal luminal HMEC. This is interesting because the SUM-190 cells emerged only from the cells cultured in the LPA-containing medium. We cultured the cells in this medium for many passages and once the line was well established, the cells (for some reason?) no longer required LPA in their medium for continuous growth.
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