Abstract 2861: Inhibition of mTOR and AKT as a potential strategy for the treatment of basal-like breast cancer

Basal-like breast cancer is an aggressive disease, for which effective targeted therapies are lacking. The frequent loss of phosphatase and tensin homolog (PTEN) and aberrant activation of phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K)-AKT-mTOR pathway in basal-like breast cancer make it an attractive therapeutic strategy to target AKT and mTOR. To evaluate the effect of PTEN loss on tumor cell sensitivity to mTOR inhibition, we performed PTEN knockdown experiment in vitro using a basal-like breast cancer cell line WU-BC3, which was derived from a patient with triple negative breast cancer. A more dramatic reduction in cell proliferation was observed in WU-BC3 siPTEN compared to that in WU-BC3 siControl following 7 days of treatment with the mTOR inhibitor MK-8669 (p