Research Paper Volume 14, Issue 16 pp 6668—6688

Figure 8. Synergistic anti-tumorigenic effect in animal study. To validate the role of miR-148a in tumorigenesis and evaluate the effect of miR-148a overexpression on tumor growth in vivo, miR-148a overexpression and NC clones with scrambled pCDH-NC were injected subcutaneously in 8-week-old nude mice to allow tumor growth (red circle: NC; blue circle: miR-148a overexpression). (A) One week after implantation, the mice were assigned to two groups and saline (Left) or bevacizumab (Right) was injected at the tumor site to evaluate the synergistic anti-tumorigenic effect. (B) Mice that received bevacizumab and miR-148a overexpression had significantly smaller cancer lumps than those that received saline and NC. (C) After the tumor-bearing mice were sacrificed at 3 weeks after tumor cell seeding, tumor burdens were analyzed. Mice that received bevacizumab had significantly smaller cancer lumps than those that received saline (P = 0.005) but larger lumps than those that received bevacizumab + miR-148a overexpression (P = 0.007). (D) Mice that received bevacizumab had significantly lower tumor weight than those that received saline (P = 0.02) but higher tumor weight than those that received bevacizumab + miR-148a overexpression (P = 0.004).