Figure 7.

Attenuation of anti-tumor activity of PTX plus an HO-1 inhibitor by macrophage depletion in a murine syngeneic breast tumor model. (A) Macrophage depletion was confirmed by flow cytometry. (B) 4T1 breast cancer-bearing mice were injected with vehicle or PTX (5 mg/kg, 5 days) in combination with daily intraperitoneal injection of ZnPP (40 mg/kg). For macrophage depletion, mice were treated with clodronate liposomes 3 times at 4-day intervals as described in Materials and Methods. Representative photographs of tumors are shown for each group. (C) Tumor volume was calculated as a relative change and plotted as the mean ± SEM. (D) Representative images of tumor sections stained for CD8⁺ T cells and DAPI are shown. (E,F) The whole-tumor mRNA expression levels of Cxcl9 and Cxcl10 were analyzed by qPCR. *, **, *** Significantly different between groups compared (* p < 0.05; ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001).