Oestrogen receptors and prolactin in rat mammary tumour development

Abstract

Mammary cancer has been a challenge to researchers for many years, because of the continuous menace of this disease to (wo)mankind. Since it is difficult to study the mechanism of mammary gland carcinogenesis experimentally in the human, model systems had to be devised. "Spontaneous" mammary tumours in rats are quite rare, or occur only after a very long period (Burek & Hollander, 1977; Burek, 1978). Therefore, induction of tumours has been used to obtain large amounts of tumour tissue. Two tumour model systems which are relevant to the work presented in this thesis will be described in some detail