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. 2010 Dec 20;5(12):e15630. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0015630

Figure 2. Breast tumor initiating cell (BT-IC) proportion correlates with poor clinical response to neo-adjuvant chemotherapy.

Figure 2

(A) The example of ALDH1+ primary cancer cells in the progressive disease (PD) samples (symbol “•”, n = 13) is 13.2% whereas 0.4% in partial response (PR) samples (symbol “⧫”, n = 13) (p = 0.007). All these 26 cancer tissue samples were obtained before chemotherapy. (B) Breast tumors with progressive or stable disease(PD/SD) (7 cases) have more cancer cells CD44+/CD24− phenotype than those with PR (7 cases) (35.0%±9.13% vs. 1.56%±0.33%, p<0.001). (C) Mammosphere formation of primary cancer cells in breast tumors with PD/SD is 10–20 fold higher than those with PR (15.2% vs. 0.83%, p<0.001).