Fig. 2

Human tumours express a panel of cytokines and angiogenic factors. a Screening of human tumour cells-expressed cytokines (screened with human primers) in the xenografts (n = 6 tumours per group pooled from two independent experiments). All molecule expression was normalised against the expression of housekeeping genes, namely GAPDH and ACTB. The expression levels of cytokines in DLD1 and SKBR7 xenografts are presented as relative (fold change) to their expression levels in HCT116 xenograft, which showed intermediate recruitment levels of proangiogenic monocytes. b Confirmation of cytokine expression level in tumour xenografts by ELISA. The protein levels of TNF, IFNγ and VEGF-A were quantified in protein extract of DLD1, HCT116 and SKBR7 xenografts (n = 5 samples per tumour type) by ELISA. The data are presented as mean ± s.d., **p-value <0.005 in Kruskal–Wallis test. c Cytokine and angiogenic factor expression in samples of human colorectal carcinoma from the CREMEC tumour collection. The expression levels in samples (n = 27 xenografts of independent human primary colorectal tumours from different individuals) are presented as relative (fold change) to their levels in HCT116 xenograft. The red dashed line indicates the reference level