Gene-expression profile of triple negative breast cancer cells stimulated with post-surgery wound-healing fluids

Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive breast cancer subtype showing high recurrences and mortality rate, for which no therapies besides chemotherapy are available to date. Lacking specific markers for an effective targeted therapy, TNBCs still represent the most important challenge for clinical oncologists.TNBC definition for lack of expression markers underscored the urgent need of discover the “drivers” for this disease and their role in aggressiveness to develop specific targeted therapies. In the effort to identify drivers responsible of early TNBC relapse, we choose to take advantage of the pro-tumorigenic activity of post-surgery wound healing fluids (WHFs) of breast cancer patients that represents the microenvironment constituted of peripheral blood of patients in which disseminated tumor cells reside and that can strongly influence the survival of tumor cells allowing distant relapses. . The stimulus of this enriched microenvironment created immediately post-surgery can determine a selecting pressure for the survival of most aggressive tumor cells modulating the expression of existing or new molecules on TNBC surface driving the develop of distant metastases. By using WHF to stimulate human TNBC cell models prior gene expression profile, we identify the significant up-modulation of the plasma membrane receptor CUB-domain containing protein 1 (CDCP1). Five triple negative breast cancer cell lines, MDA-MB-231, BT549, MDA-MB-468, SUM149, MDA-MB-157, were seeded in 10 cm petri dishes, grown at 70% of confluence, starved for 24 h in RPMI medium without FBS and then stimulated or not with RPMI containing pool of post-surgery wound healing fluids from breast cancer patients at final concentration of 5% for 48 h. Two independent replicates were collected for each cell line.