Eur Respir J 2009, 33:1195–1205.PubMedCrossRef Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Authors’ contributions WSJ, YZJ: Conceived and designed the experiments; ZLK, ZFS: Performed the experiments and analysed the data; WKZ, GFC: Contributed reagents/material/analysis tools/. All authors read PD0332991 an approved the final draft.”
“Background LY2109761 supplier breast cancer is one of the most commonly seen, malignant tumors

in human, and the incidence rate is gradually increasing year by year. Based on the GLOBOCAN 2008 estimates, breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed cancer and the leading cause of cancer death among females, accounting for 23% of the total cancer cases and 14% of the cancer deaths[1]. Currently, combined therapy, which primarily focused on surgical removal, chemotherapy and endocrine therapy based on tamoxifen, is employed for most cases of breast cancer. The poor prognosis of the patients with advanced stage breast cancer is due mainly to the progression and metastasis of the disease after the standard surgical

treatment. Clearly, a better understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying the progression of breast cancer is needed to control the MK-4827 disease. With the development of molecular biology and genetic engineering, the gene therapy is the research focus on prevention and treatment of tumor. Currently, gene therapies for tumor include gene replacement, antisense Amoxicillin nucleic acid technique, cytokine gene therapy, and RNA interference technique mostly focused in recent years. RNA interference is the most effective gene silencing technique, while being simple, effective, and specific as its advantages. The short hairpin RNA (shRNA) could automatically be processed to become small interfering RNA(siRNA) to silence target gene, and it was proven to be more stable than siRNA[2]. Metastasis associated antigen 1 (MTA1) is a tumor metastasis associated candidate gene, it was originally

identified by differential screening of a cDNA library from highly metastatic and non-metastatic rat mammary adenocarcinoma cell lines[3, 4]. Overexpression of MTA1 plays an important role in tumorigenesis and tumor aggressiveness, especially tumor invasiveness and metastasis, including breast cancer[5]. The ER expression status is related to a variety of histologic characteristics of breast cancer. Most tumors with low grades are ER-positive but, in contrast, tumor demonstrating histologic evidence of poor tumor differentiation are frequently ER-negative[6]. Molecular characterizations and epidemiological studies for breast cancer showed that it was important roles of ER in tumorigeness and progression. ER subtypes, ER alpha(ERα), was known to mediate estrogen signaling; and the function as ligand-dependent transcription factors. At the molecular level, the consequence of ER activation appears to be alterations in transcriptional activity and expression profiles of target genes.