Breast Cancer Progression in the Presence of Treated and Untreated Left Ventricular Dysfunction

We hypothesized that treating heart failure mitigates its impact on cancer progression and that different treatments (carvedilol, enalapril, empagliflozin) may have distinct effects. For this reason we have created an mouse model combining both heart failure (LAD ligation) and 4T1 metastatic breast cancer to study the effects of these treatments on breast cancer development at different levels: primary tumor growth in vivo, metastasis development and RNA-sequencing of the primary tumor. Twenty samples divided in five different groups were analyzed with RNA sequencing: group 1= Ctrl; group 2= HF/veh; group 3= HF/car; group 4= HF/emp group 5 HF/ena. HF medications with different mechanisms of action had distinct effects on 4T1 progression when the two diseases coexisted. These effects varied from isolated effects on the tumor transcriptome, to effects on the expansion of the primary tumor and on metastatic spread in the lungs.