Spheres culture from lung adenocarcinoma pleural effusions

Briefly, we analyzed gene expression profiles in adherent cultures compared to sphere cultures from malignant pleural effusions (MPEs). MPEs could represent an opportunity to culture a wide variety of cancer cells from different donors. In this study, we set up culture conditions for cancer cells deriving from MPEs of several patients affected by the most frequent form of lung cancer, namely the subset of non small cell lung cancers (NSCLC) classified as Lung Adenocarcinomas, to show that MPEs are an excellent source of tumor initiating cells for the study of lung adenocarcinoma.