Growing Breast Cancer Cells In The lab has been a revelation to Vuk Stambolic. The protocol he follows is decades old and widely used, but there's a puzzle at its core. The recipe calls for a large dose of glucose, a growth factor called EGF, and insulin. Add these to tissue culture, and tumor cells will be fruitful and multiply. A curious thing happens if you try to wean the tumor cells off insulin, however: They "drop off and they die," says Stambolic, a cancer researcher at the University of Toronto in Canada. "They're addicted to [insulin]." What makes this so "bizarre," Stambolic says, is that this behavior is totally unlike that of the healthy breast cells from which these tumor cells are derived. Normal cells are not sensitive to insulin-or at least not nearly to the same degree. They don't have insulin receptors, and they lack key elements of the insulin signaling pathway necessary to make insulin outside the cell immediately relevant to what goes on inside. Indeed, normal cells thrive without insulin. By contrast, the tumor cells in culture can't live without it.
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