%0 Journal Article
%T Inoculated mammary carcinoma-associated fibroblasts: contribution to hormone independent tumor growth
%A Victoria T Fabris
%A Ana Sahores
%A Silvia I Vanzulli
%A Lucas Colombo
%A Alfredo A Molinolo
%A Claudia Lanari
%A Caroline A Lamb
%J BMC Cancer
%D 2010
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1471-2407-10-293
%X Purified EPI cells of HD and HI tumors were inoculated alone, or together with CAF-HI, into female BALB/c mice and tumor growth was evaluated. In another set of experiments, purified EPI-HI alone or combined with CAF-HI or CAF-HI-GFP were inoculated into BALB/c or BALB/c-GFP mice. We assessed whether inoculated CAF-HI persisted within the tumors by analyzing inoculated or host CAF in frozen sections of tumors growing in BALB/c or BALB/c-GFP mice. The same model was used to evaluate early stages of tumor development and animals were euthanized at 2, 7, 12 and 17 days after EPI-HI or EPI-HI+CAF-HI inoculation. In angiogenesis studies, tumor vessels were quantified 5 days after intradermal inoculation.We found that admixed CAF-HI failed to induce epithelial HD tumor growth, but instead, enhanced HI tumor growth (p < 0.001). Moreover, inoculated CAF-HI did not persist within the tumors. Immunofluorescence studies showed that inoculated CAF-HI disappeared after 13 days. We studied the mechanisms by which CAF-HI increased HI tumor growth, and found a significant increase in angiogenesis (p < 0.05) in the co-injected mice at early time points.Inoculated CAF-HI do not persist within the tumor mass although they play a role during the first stages of tumor formation promoting angiogenesis. This angiogenic environment is unable to replace the hormone requirement of HD tumors that still need the hormone to recruit the stroma from the host.Breast cancers are comprised of epithelial neoplastic cells embedded in a tumor microenvironment composed mainly of extracellular matrix and non-neoplastic cells such as inflammatory cells, vascular cells and fibroblasts [1]. Fibroblasts growing within the tumor mass are known as carcinoma-associated fibroblasts (CAF). They express smooth muscle actin and are found in large numbers in most invasive human breast cancers [2]. There is increasing evidence that CAF play different roles supporting tumor growth [3]. Several studies have addressed t
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2407/10/293