Breast cancer hybrid cells after spontaneous cell fusion with MSC display tumor dorming-like properties

Functional changes were investigated in vitro and in vivo following spontaneous fusion and hybrid cell formation in co-cultures of primary human mesenchymal stroma/stem-like cells (MSC) with human MDA-MB-231 breast cancer cells. Lentiviral fluorescence-labeled MSC with eGFP and breast cancer cells labeled with mcherry resulted in dual-fluorescing hybrid cells. Double FACS sorting and single cell cloning revealed different aneuploid hybrid populations (MDA-hyb1 MDA-hyb3, MDA-hyb5) A total of 4 different total RNA samples was subjected to microarray analysis according to a single-color design.