autocrine regulation of cell proliferation by estrogen receptor-alpha in estrogen receptor-alpha-positive breast cancer cell lines自分泌的细胞增殖调控雌激素receptor-alpha雌激素receptor-alpha-positive乳腺癌细胞系.pdfVIP

BMC Cancer BioMed Central Research article Open Access Autocrine regulation of cell proliferation by estrogen receptor-alpha in estrogen receptor-alpha-positive breast cancer cell lines Huining Tan, Yili Zhong and Zhongzong Pan* Address: Department of Animal Science, Vermont Cancer Center, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT 05405, USA Email: Huining Tan - htan1@; Yili Zhong - yzhong@; Zhongzong Pan* - zpan@ * Corresponding author Published: 26 January 2009 Received: 19 September 2008 Accepted: 26 January 2009 BMC Cancer 2009, 9:31 doi:10.1186/1471-2407-9-31 This article is available from: /1471-2407/9/31 © 2009 Tan et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Estrogen receptor-α (ERα) is essential for mammary gland development and is a major oncogene in breast cancer. Since ERα is not colocalized with the cell proliferation marker Ki-67 in the normal mammary glands and the majority of primary breast tumors, it is generally believed that paracrine regulation is involved in ERα mediated cell proliferation. In the paracrine model, ERα-positive cells dont proliferate but will release some paracrine growth factors to stimulate the neighboring cells to proliferate. In a subpopulation of cancer cells