Co-culture of human prostate cancer cells and mouse osteoblasts as a model for tumor dormancy in bone metastasis

Prostate cancer (PCa) cells, when disseminated to the bone, may stay quiescent or dormant for years before proliferation into overt metastases. Previous studies suggest that osteoblasts, the bone forming cells, may be responsible for induction of dormancy of bone-disseminated prostate cancer cells. We have established an in vitro co-culture system between human prostate cancer C4-2B cells and mouse osteoblast MC3T3-E1 cells in a ration of 1:30 to consistently and robustly induce the dormant phenotypes and representative dormant markers. To further characterize the dormancy signature of PCa cells in bone, we applied high-throughput RNA-Seq to profile the transcriptomes of co-cultured C4-2B cells and MC3T3-E1 cells, as well as both cells cultured alone as control.