Mammary gland-specific ablation of focal adhesion kinase reduces the incidence of p53-mediated mammary tumour formation.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Elevated expression of focal adhesion kinase (FAK) occurs in numerous human cancers including colon-, cervix- and breast cancer. Although several studies have implicated FAK in mammary tumour formation induced by ectopic oncogene expression, evidence supporting a role for FAK in spontaneous mammary tumour development caused by loss of tumour suppressor genes such as p53 is lacking. Alterations in the tumour suppressor gene p53 have been implicated in over 50% of human breast cancers. Given that elevated FAK expression highly correlates with p53 mutation status in human breast cancer, we set out to investigate the importance of FAK in p53-mediated spontaneous mammary tumour development.

Methods

To directly assess the role of FAK, we generated mice with conditional

SUBMITTER: van Miltenburg MH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4037829 | biostudies-literature | 2014 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature