Molecular interplay between dormant bone marrow-resident cells (BMRCs) and CTCs in breast cancer.

Despite widespread knowledge that bone marrow-resident breast cancer cells (BMRCs) affect tumor progression, signaling mechanisms of BMRCs implicated in maintaining long-term dormancy have not been characterized. To overcome these hurdles, we developed a novel experimental model of tumor dormancy employing circulating tumor cells (CTCs) derived from metastatic breast cancer patients (de novo CTCs), transplanted them in immunocompromised mice, and re-isolated these cells from xenografted mice bone marrow (ex vivo BMRCs) and blood (ex vivo CTCs) to perform downstream transcriptomic analyses.

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Boral D, Liu HN, Kenney SR, Marchetti D