The gene expression differences between pancreatic cancer cell lines and its high liver metastatic lines

A significant proportion of differentially expressed genes were associated with extracellular matrix organization and extracellular structure organization. BALB/c AJcl nu/nu female mice were purchased from CLEA (Tokyo, Japan) and transported to our institution at 4-weeks-old. After 1 week, parental PANC-1 and SUIT-2 cells (1×106 cells) were injected into the tail of the pancreas. The mice were humanely killed at 4–7 weeks after injection. Tiny hepatic metastases were harvested and minced. We performed primary culture using minced tissue with collagenase, and the cell culture was then injected into the pancreas. This process was repeated five times to establish the highly metastatic PANC-1 and SUIT-2 cell line.