HCC xenograft model. (A–D) Immunohistochemistry of Huh-7 tumors grown after SC injection into NOD/SCID mice, with specific antibodies for aurora-A (A), aurora-B (B), and phospho-H3S10 (C). Comparable results were found in HepG2 tumors (see text). (D) PHA-739358 effectively inhibits growth of Huh-7 (D; n = 11 vs n = 10 controls) and HepG2 (n = 12 vs n = 12 controls) tumors in vivo. Box plots indicating median, upper and lower quartiles, as well as lowest and highest observations. Small circles indicate mild outliers; no extreme outliers were observed. PHA-739358 at a dosage of 15 mg/kg twice per day (dark gray bars) was well tolerated and significantly suppressed tumor growth compared with vehicle-treated controls (light gray bars; see text). Different end points for the two cell lines were due to the differential growth rate of Huh-7 or HepG2 tumors, respectively.