PMID: 9183656Dec 1, 1996Paper

Induction and reversal of cell adhesion-dependent multicellular drug resistance in solid breast tumors

Human Cell
R S KerbelJ Rak

Abstract

Although there are a number of chemotherapeutic drugs available for the treatment of breast cancer, eg. adriamycin, cyclophosphamide and taxol, their effectiveness is severely limited by expression of intrinsic resistance in some patients and by acquired resistance in others. There is thus an urgent need to develop innovative methods to try and make these drugs more effective than is currently the case. One such method is to combine them with novel "chemosensitizers", i.e., drugs which themselves lack anti-tumor cytotoxic properties but which will increase the efficacy of those which do. In this regard we hae been studying the hypothesis that the resistance of solid tumors, including breast cancer, can be expressed at the prototissue/multicellular level, and that this "multicellular resistance" can be minimized or reversed by the appropriate use of so-called "anti-adhesive" agents. RESULTS/BACKGROUND: It is well known that monolayer cultures of tumor cells-including murine breast cancer-are generally much more intrinsically chemosensitive than the same cells grown as solid tumors in vivo. However, the relative resistance of solid tumors can often be recapitulated in tissue culture simply by growth of the tumor cells as three di...Continue Reading

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