This phenomenon of

neighbour suppression has been studied in fibroblasts in vitro and we have extended the observation to epithelial cells and their transformed derivatives from a variety of tissues confirming a general relevance to cancer as >90% of cancers originate from epithelial cells. We confirm the contact-dependent nature of suppression in epithelial cells and determine the nature of the cell cycle arrest. To identify molecular effectors involved in this form of growth arrest, we studied pancreatic epithelial cells as >90% of pancreatic cancers carry a mutation in Kras as the initiating AZD8931 order oncogenic event. To identify the molecular mechanism of neighbour suppression we analysed normal mouse pancreatic ductal epithelial cells, matched derivatives expressing

physiological levels of oncogenic KrasG12D and co-cultures of these cells. Although expression of the oncogene, Kras, was not affected in co-cultures where the transformed growth was suppressed, gene expression profiling identified genes responsive to expression of KrasG12D along with a subset which were normalised upon co-culture with normal cells. Thus a subset of oncogene-responsive genes are normalised in conditions where the transformed phenotype is suppressed. Analysis of normal and tumourous human pancreatic tissue and mice with varying degrees of mosaicism for KrasG12D oncogene expression shows the importance of the phenomenon and AZD2171 mouse this subset of oncogene-regulated and normalisation-competent DOCK10 genes in an in vivo setting. O37 Fibroblast-Dependent Epithelial Cell Invasion in a Reconstruct Model for Esophageal Cancer Claudia Andl

1 1 Surgery and Cancer Biology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA The aim of our study is to analyze the effects of epithelial-mesenchymal crosstalk on cancer cell migration and invasion. Based on selleck compound previous findings that 70% of esophageal tumors demonstrate the coordinated loss of E-cadherin and TGFβreceptorII (TβRII), we established an in vitro model using immortalized human esophageal keratinocytes, expressing dominant-negative mutants of E-cadherin and TβRII (ECdnT). To allow the analysis of epithelial and mesenchymal crosstalk, epithelial reconstructs were utilized by seeding ECdnT cells on an extracellular matrix with embedded fibroblast. We found that the ECdnT cells invade into the underlying collagen/matrigel matrix with embedded fibroblasts, but not in Boyden chamber invasion assays in the absence of fibroblasts. Crosstalk between the epithelial compartment and the surrounding microenvironment is essential for mediating invasion.