Fig. 8

TUNEL staining showing differentially increased apoptosis in the pancreas of drug treated orthotopic murine model: The murine PDAC tissue from the control group shows the lowest proportion of TUNEL positive cells (arrow) in the pancreatic tissue. Both the sunitinib/chloroquine doublet treatment and the Chemo/sunitinib/chloroquine triplet treatment robustly increases the apoptotic cells in the ductal carcinoma region (six to sevenfold increase, p = 0.0017 and 0.0037, respectively). As shown in the bar-chart, the chemo alone, and Chemo/sunitinib doublet treatment also increase apoptosis significantly (two to threefold increase, p < 0.05), whereas sunitinib and the Chemo/chloroquine treatment do not alter apoptosis significantly (p = 0.79 and 0.53, respectively). Sham vehicle control, Chemo gemcitabine plus paclitaxel, Sun sunitinib, CQ chloroquine. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01. Scale bar: 10 µm