Description
Patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma (RCC) have a life expectancy of 6 months to 1 year. The deadly nature of RCC compared to other tumors that metastasize to bone, such as prostate cancer (PC), is associated with extensive arteriogenesis that requires recruitment of muscle progenitor cells to form the vascular smooth muscle around these large vessels. To identify potential genes that are involved in RCC recruitment of muscle progenitor cells we performed a microarray analysis to evaluate the global gene expression of human RCC (786-O) cells that form these large vessels in murine xenografts, versus human PC (PC3) that do not form these large vessels during osteolytic bone metastasis in mice (Xie C, et al. J Orthop Res. 2011;30(2):325-33). To assess changes in gene expression that occur when tumor cells interact with muscle progenitor cells, primary myoblast isolated from 5-day-old C57BL/6-Tg GFP neonatal mouse limbs were co-cultured with RCC or PC cells.