In vitro assessment of the inflammatory breast cancer cell line SUM 149: Discovery of two single nucleotide polymorphisms in the RNase L gene.

196 Background: Inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) is a rare, aggressive form of breast cancer, accounting for 5% of breast cancers diagnosed annually in the United States. Understanding the distinct biology of IBC could help provide novel treatment targets. We sought to evaluate whether or not the IBC cell lines SUM 149 and SUM 190 demonstrated evidence of viral infection. Methods: We performed single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotyping for 2 variants of the ribonuclease (RNase) L gene that have been correlated with the risk of prostate cancer due to a possible viral etiology. We also performed proliferation assays; developed dose response curves to assess the treatment effect of interferon-alpha (IFN-a); and assayed for evidence of the putative human mammary tumor virus (HMTV, which has been implicated but not definitively associated with IBC,) in the DNA and RNA of SUM 149 cells. Results: According to our allelic discrimination SNP assay, 2/2 IBC cell lines were homozygous for the 462 and 541 varian...