ABSTRACT: ABSTRACT: Introduction: Basal-like and luminal breast cancers have distinct stromal-epithelial interactions, which likely play a role in progression to invasive cancer. However, little is known about how stromal-epithelial interactions evolve in benign and pre-invasive lesions.Methods: To study epithelial-stroma interactions in basal-like breast cancer progression, we cocultured reduction mammoplasty fibroblasts with the isogenic MCF10 series of cell lines (representing benign/normal, atypical hyperplasia, and ductal carcinoma in situ). We used gene expression microarrays to identify pathways induced by coculture in premalignant cells (MCF10DCIS) compared to normal and benign (MCF10A and MCF10AT1). Relevant pathways were then (1) targeted in vitro and effects on morphogenesis were evaluated and (2) evaluated in vivo for associations with basal-like subtype. Results: Our results show that premalignant MCF10DCIS cells express characteristic gene expression patterns of invasive basal-like microenvironments. Furthermore, while HGF secretion is upregulated (relative to normal, MCF10A levels) when fibroblasts are cocultured with either atypical (MCF10AT cells) or premalignant (MCF10DCIS) cells, only MCF10DCIS cells upregulate the HGF receptor, MET. In 3-dimensional cultures, upregulation of HGF/MET in MCF10DCIS cells induced morphological changes suggestive of invasive potential, and these changes were reversed by antibody-based blocking of HGF signaling. These results are relevant to in vivo progression because high expression of a novel MCF10DCIS-derived HGF signature was correlated with basal-like subtype among invasive cancers, with approximately 86% of basal-like cancers highly expressing the HGF signature. Conclusions: In this study we document coordinated and complementary changes in HGF secretion and MET expression in epithelium and stroma in pre-invasive lesions. These results suggest that targeting stroma-derived HGF signaling in early carcinogenesis may block progression of basal-like precursor lesions.Introduction: In breast cancers, the basal-like subtype has high levels of genomic instability relative to other breast cancer subtypes with many basal-like-specific regions of aberration. There is evidence that this genomic instability extends to smaller scale genomic aberrations as well, as shown by a previously described micro-event in the PTEN gene in the Basal-like SUM149 breast cancer cell line. Methods: We sought to identify if small regions of genomic change exist by using a high density, gene centric Comparative Genomic Hybridizations (CGH) array on both cell lines and primary tumors. A custom Agilent tiling array for CGH (244,000 probes, 200bp tiling resolution) was created to identify small regions of genomic change and was focused on previously identified basal-like-specific, and general cancer genes. Tumor genomic DNA from 94 patients and 2 breast cancer cell lines was labeled and hybridized to these arrays. Aberrations were called using SWITCHdna and the smallest 25% of SWITCHdna-defined genomic segments being called micro-aberrations (<64 contiguous probes, ~ <15kb). Results: Our data showed that primary tumor breast cancer genomes frequently contained areas of small-scale copy number gains and losses, termed micro-aberrations, which are undetectable using lower-density genome-wide platforms. The basal-like subtype exhibited the highest incidence of these events. These micro-aberrations sometimes altered expression of the involved gene as suggested by data from microarray and mRNA-seq studies. We confirmed the presence of the PTEN micro-amplification in SUM149 and by mRNA-seq showed that this resulted in loss of expression of all exons downstream of this event. Micro-aberrations disproportionately affected the 5’ regions of the affected genes, including the promoter region, and a high frequency of micro-aberrations was associated with poor survival outcomes. Conclusion: Using a high probe density, gene-centric aCGH microarray, we present evidence of small-scale genomic aberrations that contribute to gene inactivation, and thus, genomic instability and tumor formation through a mechanism not detected using conventional copy number analyses.
