Figure 2.

Co-culture of fibroblasts with breast cancer cells drives the secretion of growth factors and extracellular matrix proteins. As in Figure 1, conditioned media was prepared from single homotypic cell cultures of fibroblasts (F) and cancer cells (MCF7), for comparison with MCF7-fibroblast co-cultures. Note that certain key factors were highly upregulated, including TGFβ2, FGFβ, MMP2, MMP9, fibronectin and activated PAI-1. An asterisk indicates statistical significance; see Table 1 for specific p-values.