Abstract
Glioma is a type of malignant brain tumor. Despite the current progress of radiation and chemotherapy regimens, tumor prognosis is still poor. Since gliomas rapidly invade normal brain tissues, most of them are diagnosed at an advanced stage. Thus, a better understanding of glioma tumorigenesis and characteristics is very important for brain tumor therapy. Previous in vitro studies, which were usually performed by using conventional tumor cell lines in the 2D culture environment, failed to show the similarity to human glioma. Here we used glioma-initiating cells (GIC) which were established by gene transfection. In this study, we proposed a new in vitro assay model created in a 3D microfluidic device. This model allowed us to investigate the invasion process of GIC cocultured with human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC). We found that GIC invasiveness in coculture was higher than that in monoculture. We also found that GIC formed cell clusters in monoculture. These results suggest that HUVEC promoted the GIC invasiveness through weakening their intercellular adhesion.
