Functional characterization of osteosarcoma cell lines provides representative models to study the human disease

Cancer cell lines represent in vitro models for studying malignancies, general cell biology, drug discovery and more. Whether they can be considered as exact representative models of the parental tumors remains uncertain given the acquisition of additional ex vivo changes of the cells and the lack of tissue architecture and stroma. Previously, within the EuroBoNeT consortium, we characterized a collection of bone sarcoma cell lines on genomic and proteomic level. Here, we address the phenotypical and functional characterization of the unique set of osteosarcoma cell lines (n=19) in vitro and in vivo. For functional analysis of differentiation capacity, cells were stimulated towards osteobla…