Preclinical orthotopic and intracardiac injection models of human breast cancer metastasis to bone and their use in drug discovery.

Breast cancer is the most common malignancy in women, with the development of distant metastases rendering the condition incurable. Relatively little is known about the factors governing the progression from primary tumor to metastasis, in part because of the difficulty in modeling what is a complex series of events. Detailed in this unit are descriptions of two murine models of breast cancer metastasis to bone that can be used to screen the effectiveness of new chemical entities on this disease process.