WIKIMEDIA, JENSFLORIANA widely used human cancer cell line, U87MG, was first established at Uppsala University in Sweden in 1966. But a new validation study from Bengt Westermark, who was part of the team that first created U87MG and several other glioblastoma multiforme cell lines, and colleagues finds the U87MG cells available from the cell repository ATCC are not the same as the original U87MG cells from Uppsala.
The Scientist spoke with Westermark about his team’s latest analysis of U87MG, which was published in Science Translational Medicine today (August 31).
The Scientist: What led you to question the purity of the cell line?
Westermark: Out of the cell lines I studied in my thesis, U87 was the worst. It was really very difficult to handle. It grew very slowly—large, flat cells that had a long doubling time. They were always lagging behind in my studies. [Years later] I noticed that people loved this cell line. There came many publications on this cell line. I started to question why, because I hated this cell line. Very slowly, the suspicion came that maybe it is not U87. Maybe it is something else. At last, we ...
