Heterotypic Interactions of CNAF and CAF with Breast Cancer Cell Lines (2011)
Undergraduate: Jim Broughman
Faculty Advisor: Melissa Troester
Department: Biology
The goal of this study is to compare the proliferative and migratory response of two epithelial cancer cell lines when cultured with fibroblasts.
Aim 1. Use cell-based assays in culture to evaluate the effect of fibroblast-epithelial communication on proliferation and migration of cancer cells lines. 6 pairs of CAF and CNAF cell lines have been obtained from the tumors of six different breast cancer patients. Each of these twelve cell lines (2 cell lines per patient X 6 patients) will be grown together with two different breast cancer cell lines and the abilities of CAFs to induce phenotypic changes in breast cancer cells will be compared with that of reduction mammoplasty fibroblasts and cancer-adjacent non-neoplastic fibroblasts. We hypothesize that both epithelial cancer cell lines will show an increase in proliferation and migration when cultured with the CNAF and CAF cell lines.
Aim 2. Use gene expression data from co-cultures of fibroblasts and cancer cells to understand the signaling pathways that are altered by paracrine factors during indirect co-culture. We will co-culture each of the 12 fibroblast cell lines discussed in Aim 1 indirectly with both cancer cell lines. We will then isolate RNA from each cell line and perform microarrays to characterize the genotypic changes in the fibroblast and cancer cell lines. We hypothesize that the fibroblast and cancer cell lines will undergo genetic alterations when placed in indirect co-culture.