Question: What kinds of cancer cells do you experiment with, and what experiments are you doing with them?

Vicky Forster answered on 11 Nov 2013:

Hey ninap, that’s a really good question.

At the moment I mainly work with two types of cells. One are what we call ‘cell lines’ and these are cells which have originally come from people with cancer, but we are able to grow them in the lab indefinitely. The first one of these cell lines was taken from a lady in 1951, who had cervical cancer. She sadly died the same year, but her cells are still around today, infact I have some in my lab at work, and they are called HeLas, named after the lady who they were taken from-Henrietta Lacks. As long as they are given the correct nutrients – they will keep dividing. These cell lines are great, because we can grow as many cells as we need to test new cancer drugs on for example. I mainly use blood cancer cell lines – the one I used today is a white blood cell line taken from a Japanese man with leukaemia in the 1980’s. It is older than I am!

The second type of cell that we frequently use for experiments are samples from patients that are being treated in the nearby hospitals. It is very important that we use these cells as soon as they are taken from the patient – as unlike cell lines, they do not survive very well in the lab, and will die within a few days/weeks after being taken out of the patient. What we normally do with these cells is take the DNA out of them, and look at the DNA to see what has gone wrong to cause the cancer in the first place. Sometimes we can use this information to recommend which treatments the patient gets to increase their chances of beating their cancer, so it is quite important.