gms | German Medical Science

Bone, besides lung and liver, is one of the most preferential metastatic target sites for breast cancers. Although the precise molecular mechanisms underlying this preference need to be elucidated, it appears that bone microenvironments possess unique biological features that enable circulating cancer cells to home, survive and proliferate, and destroy bone. The crosstalk between metastatic breast cancer cells and bone is critical to the development and progression of bone metastases. Disruption of this interaction will allow us to design mechanism-based effective and specific therapeutic interventions for bone metastases. We have established a coculture system of different breast cancer cell lines stable transfected with red fluorescence and human primary osteoblasts (hOB) or MG63 human osteosarcoma cells to analyze tumor cell migration and invasion to bone. We could show that breast cancer cell invasion was increased when cocultured with hOB or MG63. Using this model we will examine the influence of various pharmaceuticals on migration and invasion of the tumor cells on cellular as well as molecular level.