Case report of pulmonary metastasis in a male Wistar rat glioblastoma model

Glioblastoma (GBM) is a highly aggressive central nervous system cancer. Its extracranial metastases have rarely been reported in the past few decades. Moreover, the pathogenesis of extracranial GBM metastases remains unclear. Here, we report a case of pulmonary metastasis in a male Wistar rat of C6 GBM model. This reported Wistar male rat was one of the experimental control group without any other intervention except for C6 GBM cells orthotopic implantation. On postoperative day 15, the animal which was reported in this study showed highly cellular, pleomorphic, tumor with nuclear atypia in the brain (Ki67, approximately 65.7%) and lungs (Ki67, 49.5%). Tumor cells in the lung showed immunoreactivity for glial fibrillary acidic protein. Inflammatory CD68(+) cell infiltration, weakly positive E-cadherin, and strongly positive staining for vimentin were observed both in tumors in the brain and lungs. Based on further morphological analysis, we speculate that the potential metastatic route into the lung might be hematogenous metastasis.