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. 2015 Feb 15;14:43. doi: 10.1186/s12943-015-0291-7

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© Christopoulos et al.; licensee BioMed Central. 2015

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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The IGF-1 role in breast cancer. IGF-1 is mostly secreted by stromal cells and acts through paracrine signaling to adjacent epithelial tumor cells and vice versa. Once the disease is well established within the primary breast tumor microenvironment, IGF-1 autocrine (within epithelium) and endocrine (via the systemic circulation) activity facilitates disease progression and metastasis respectively. Within the new tumor location, the interplay between metastasized breast cancer cells and host tissue cells, drive the last to a more cancerous phenotype via IGF-1 paracrine signaling. In addition, aberrant IGF-1 expression by host tissue cells supports BrCa proliferation via autocrine signaling.