New Transgenic Approach to Target Tumor Vasculature

摘要

Breast cancer growth relies on a blood supply. Therefore, anticancer therapies that disrupt tumor angiogenesis to starve tumor cells can be very effective. To examine the importance of candidate proteins in adult angiogenesis, we generated a transgenic mouse model expressing the receptor for an avian retrovirus only in new blood vessels. The avian retrovirus was engineered to express ephrin-B2 (a protein whose importance in blood vessel growth we wanted to examine) fused to green fluorescent protein (EGFP) and, as controls, EGFP alone and an onco-gene known to promote endothelial cell proliferation also fused to EGFP. In vivo angiogenesis assays and tumor analysis demonstrated expression of the retroviral receptor in new blood vessels and susceptibility to infection by the retrovirus causing expression of the EGFP-tagged proteins. However, optimization of virus delivery to obtain higher and more consistent levels of infection will be needed to establish if a protein has proangiogenic activity.