Women with inherited mutations in the BRCA1 gene have increased risk of developing breast cancer, but also exhibit a predisposition for the development of aggressive basal-like breast tumors. We report here that breast epithelial cells derived from patients harboring deleterious mutations in BRCA1 (BRCA1mut/+) give rise to tumors with increased basal differentiation relative to cells from BRCA1+/+ patients. Molecular analysis of disease-free breast tissues from BRCA1mut/+ patients revealed defects in progenitor cell lineage commitment even before cancer incidence. Moreover, we discovered that the transcriptional repressor Slug is an important functional regulator of human breast progenitor cell lineage commitment and differentiation and that it is aberrantly expressed in BRCA1mut/+ tissues. Slug expression is necessary for increased basal-like phenotypes prior to and following neoplastic transformation. These findings demonstrate that the genetic background of patient populations, in addition to affecting incidence rates, significantly impacts progenitor cell fate commitment and, therefore, tumor phenotype.

The aggressive clinical behavior of melanoma has led to the hypothesis that the developmental origins of melanocytes in the neural crest might be relevant for their metastatic propensity. We demonstrate that primary human melanocytes, transformed using a specific set of introduced genes, form melanomas that frequently metastasize to multiple secondary sites, while human fibroblasts and epithelial cells transformed using an identical set of genes generate primary tumors that rarely do so. Importantly, these melanomas exhibit a metastasis spectrum similar to that observed in human patients. These observations indicate that part of the metastatic proclivity of melanoma is attributable to lineage-specific factors expressed in melanocytes and not in other cell types analyzed. Analysis of microarray data from human nevi reveals that Slug, a master regulator of neural crest cell specification and migration, correlates in its expression pattern with other genes that are important for neural crest cell migrations during development. Moreover, Slug is required for the metastasis of the transformed melanoma cells. These findings indicate that melanocyte-specific factors present prior to neoplastic transformation can play a pivotal role in governing melanoma's progression.

Ample evidence to date links the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase-regulated protein kinase Akt with the induction and progression of human cancer, including breast cancer. However, there are three Akt isoforms with limited information about their specificity during oncogenesis. This study addresses the role of the three isoforms in polyoma middle T (PyMT) and ErbB2/Neu-driven mammary adenocarcinomas in mice. The effects of ablation of Akt1, Akt2, and Akt3 on the induction and the biology of these tumors were dramatically different, with ablation of Akt1 inhibiting, ablation of Akt2 accelerating, and ablation of Akt3 having a small, not statistically significant, inhibitory effect on tumor induction by both transgenes. Whereas PyMT-induced tumors are all invasive, Akt1