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An in vitro tumor-fibroblast interaction model of human oral squamous cell carcinoma

Carcinoma associated fibroblasts (CAFs) have recently been implicated in neoplastic progression, tumor growth, angiogenesis, and metastasis. This special fibroblast subpopulation plays a major role in initiation of tumor progression of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.

We established a co-culture model of SCC-25 lingual squamous cell carcinoma cells and periodontal ligament fibroblasts. Gene expression changes were analyzed by real-time PCR, western blot and immunocytochemistry. During 7 days’ co-culture CAFs were converted from normal fibroblasts showing sustained expression of stroma-derived factor. We found that CAFs produced experimentally within such a short time, induced epithelial-mesenchymal transdifferentiation (EMT) of SCC-25 cells in co-culture. EMT-SCC-25 cells showed increased expression of vimentin and the transcription factor snail, and decreased expression of E-cadherin.

These results indicated that CAF-conversion of oral fibroblasts and EMT of oral squamous cell carcinoma cells are coordinated events and could be reliably modeled in vitro.

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Correspondence to Jozséf Dudás.

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Open Access This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Dudás, J., Bitsche, M., Schartinger, V. et al. An in vitro tumor-fibroblast interaction model of human oral squamous cell carcinoma. BMC Proc 4 (Suppl 2), P32 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1186/1753-6561-4-S2-P32

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1753-6561-4-S2-P32

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