Animals were injected with MDA.-pFULG cells into t

Animals were injected with MDA.-pFULG cells into the tail vein of mice, and noninvasive weekly BLI was conducted for 7 weeks. The radiance antemortem was used as a surrogate measurement of tumor burden. After 7 weeks, when breast cancer lung metastasis was established, the tumor-bearing mice were divided randomly into two groups. Mice were then treated with leronlimab (2 mg/mouse, twice a week, 8 mice/group), and untreated mice were used as control (Fig. 7a). Prior to 7 weeks, all the animals had shown a progressive increase in metastatic tumor burden. For the purpose of the study, the tumor volume was determined for each mouse and normalized to 100% as the starting point of the intervention at 7 weeks, and tumor volume was followed weekly for each animal. In the control group, mouse death was documented from the first week, and all mice were dead by 19 weeks (Fig. 7b). In contrast, in the leronlimab-treated group, 42.9% were alive at 21 weeks and 28.6% remained alive at 37 weeks. Leronlimab treatment resulted in a significant reduction in survival rate (log-rank test, p = 0.021). None of the untreated animals showed a reduction in metastatic tumor burden (Supplemental Figure 4A,B (see Additional file 1)). In 5 out of 8 mice treated with leronlimab, a significant reduction in tumor metastatic volume was observed after 8 weeks (Fig. 7c) (Supplemental Figure 4C (see Additional file 1)).