Objective: To establish and characterize human inflammatory breast cancer xenograft in nude mice.
Methods: Animal studies, Northern and Western blot, zymograms and immunohistochemistry were used in our studies.
Results: Human transplantable inflammatory carcinoma were established in nude mice. This xenograft as its human counterpart exhibited striking erythema of the overlying skin, lympho-vascular invasion and other similar biological characteristics. It also exhibited lung metastasis 4-6 weeks after growth. This xenograft was ER, PR, Her-2/neu negative and p53, EGFR positive. Comparative studies of inflammatory breast cancer xenograft with non-inflammatory xenograft indicated 10-20 fold overexpression of E-cadherin and MUC1.
Conclusions: This human inflammatory breast carcinoma xenograft will provide an excellent animal model to allow us to further dissect out both the upstream regulatory machinery and downstream effector molecules responsible for the inflammatory carcinoma phenotype.