Fig. 7

Inhibition of PDGFRβ or PKCα activity targets BRCA1-deficient breast cancer cells, and expression of BRCA1 is inversely related with that of PDGFRβ and PKCα in breast cancers. a Expression of BRCA1, PDGFRβ, and PKCα mRNA in human breast cancer cell lines was determined by qRT-PCR. b Expression of the proteins indicated in HCC1937 and T47D cells was determined by western blot. c, d Cancer cells were treated with DMSO, PDGFR Inh III (20 nM), or Ro-31-8220 (35 nM) and the number of viable cells (c) and dead cells (d) was determined after 5 days. Data are represented as mean ± SD of triplicates. The asterisk (*) denotes a significance from DMSO- and drug-treated cells. e Representative immunostaining analysis of serial human breast cancer sections. f Summary of the immunostaining results for human breast cancer samples. * “High” expression represents the samples positively stained with an antibody in more than 2% cells (i.e., scores equal to or higher than “+” in Additional file 7B). “Low” expression represents the samples negative or positively stained with an antibody in less than 2% cells (i.e., scores less than “+/−” in Additional file 7B). The asterisk (*) denotes a significance from BRCA1 high and BRCA1 low tumors by a two-tailed Fisher’s exact test. g Correlation analysis of mRNA levels of BRCA1 and PDGFRβ or PKCα for MetaBric breast cancer patients