Tracking DNA activity patterns may someday help women with HER2+ breast cancers
THURSDAY, Aug. 18, 2016 (HealthDay News) — The activity of two genes may help predict certain breast cancer patients’ odds of survival and guide their treatment, according to research published online Aug. 17 in Oncotarget.
For the study, Paul Huang, Ph.D., of the Protein Networks Team at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, and colleagues evaluated tumors from 1,964 breast cancer patients. They focused on human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-positive breast cancers, which account for about 20 percent of breast cancers.
The researchers found that patients whose tumors had high activity in the F12 gene, but low activity in the STC2 gene, were three times more likely to die within 10 years, compared to patients with different patterns of activity in these two genes.
“Our study demonstrates the potential of in vitro cell adhesion screens as a novel approach for identifying prognostic factors for disease outcome,” Huang and colleagues write.
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