These results suggest an important role of Smad3 in transducing the mechanical forces from fluid flow to alter expression patterns of SNAI2 in breast cancer cells and support previous work by Thault et al. (2009) in which smad3, but not Smad2 knockout effectively blocked TGF-β-induced EMT response through SNAI2 signaling [80, 83]. Here, TGFB1 is linked to breast cancer.