Predicting the Spread of Breast Cancer
Reported December 23, 2008
(Ivanhoe Newswire) — Scientists discovered a new way to more accurately predict the spread of breast cancer to other tissues in the body by examining gene subnetworks.
The discovery was made by a team of U.S. and South Korean researchers who identified the subnetworks by using bioinformatics algorithms — an information technology approach to solving molecular biology problems.
The scientists sifted through mountains of gene expression profiles from large groups of women with breast cancer. The data included women whose breast cancer had spread and those whose tumors had not spread.
The team mapped the patients’ gene expression profiles to the extensive networks of signaling pathways and protein complexes in human cells that had been established in earlier studies. After studying the new data, the scientists were able to differentiate patterns in gene expression. They also discovered many genes associated with breast cancer that had not been identified in previous studies.
The study’s authors cautioned that gene expression is an imprecise science because genes switched on in cells from one part of a tumor may not be active elsewhere in the tumor. However, these findings may still change diagnostics. For example, a patient’s diagnosis could go beyond estrogen responsive breast cancer to a particular subtype of estrogen responsive breast cancer with a poor or good prognosis.
The U.S. and Korean researchers will now test their analysis on other cancers, including leukemia and prostate and lung cancers.
SOURCE: Presented at the American Society for Cell Biology 48th Annual Meeting in San Francisco, Calif., Dec. 13-17, 2008