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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2015 Dec 23.
Published in final edited form as: Oncogene. 2014 Jul 7;34(19):2437–2449. doi: 10.1038/onc.2014.189

Figure 3. The BMP receptor kinase antagonist DMH1 reduces metastases in the MMTV-PyVmT transgenic mouse model of breast cancer.

Figure 3

a) Control mice treated with vehicle (DMSO) showed typical lung metastatic burden after 6 weeks from the palpation of the primary tumor. b) Animals treated with DMH1 for 6 weeks following initial tumor palpation had far fewer lung metastases. c) Metastases were counted in lung whole mounts from a total number of 12 control and 12 DMH1 treated mice and demonstrated a statistically significant reduction in lung metastases (P=0.03). d–e) H&E staining of lung metastases confirmed that whole mount stained lungs contained metastatic tumor cells. f) IHC for pSmad1/5/8 demonstrated that spontaneous lung metastases contained strongly active BMP signaling. g) DMH1 treated animals lungs indicated reduced activity in BMP signaling by pSmad1/5/8. h) Peripheral blood was collected by cardiac puncture at the time of sacrifice and RNA was isolated. SYBR qPCR was performed to detect circulating tumor cells where markers for the tumors all showed reduction in DMH1 treated animals. Id1 transcription, which is the canonical indicator of BMP transcription, was significantly reduced in the peripheral blood of DMH1 treated animals. Microscope scale bars = 100µM. # Indicate statistically significant by students T-test. Error bars for qPCR and metastases quantification indicate SEM.