BMC Cancer 2008, 8:352 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2407/8/352 FCiTg-u3r2e2 6causes tumor destruction CT-322 causes tumor destruction. A) Sections of MiaPaCa-2 tumors were fixed in formalin and paraffin embedded. H&E staining revealed homogenous histology in tumors from the control treated animals. In contrast tumors from CT-322 treated animals showed large areas of tumor destruction (*). Representative images from each group are shown. B) Formalin fixed par- affin embedded MiaPaCa-2 tumor sections from animals treated with control or CT-322 were stained for TUNEL activity. The mean (+/- SEM) % of pixels above threshold is displayed. Treatment with CT-322 increased the number of TUNEL-positive apoptotic cells per tumor section (control 4.3 ± 2.03, CT-322 30.6 ± 6.9). Images were analyzed using Nikon Elements imaging software (2 tumors per group, 10 fields per tumor were analyzed, p < .001). Two representative pictures from each group are shown. The major finding of this study is that the adnectin CT- 322 effectively controls the growth of orthotopic pancre- atic tumors in mice by reducing VEGF-induced angiogen- esis. We evaluated the efficacy of CT-322 in xenograft (MiaPaCa-2) and syngeneic (Pan02) tumors. As a single agent CT-322 appears to be more effective in the xenograft tumors where it reduced tumor growth by 50% whereas growth was reduced by less than 25% in the syngeneic model and was not different from tumors from control- treated animals. It is worth pointing out that Pan02 tumors are more invasive locally than MiaPaCa-2 tumors and often animals with Pan02 tumors need to be sacri- ficed due to disease burden that is far smaller than what is seen in xenograft models. For instance MiaPaCa-2 tumors Page 8 of 10 (page number not for citation purposes)