If your breast cancer does not express a protein called alpha-basic-crystalline then it is good news for you, because researchers Vincent Cryns and colleagues at Northwestern University say that if a breast cancer tumor expresses alpha-basic-crystalline, that may signal poor outcome.
As you may very well know, researchers have been trying to find genes and proteins that can predict the outcome of breast cancer, with the main idea of classifying breast cancer into low risk and high risk groups. Now since we do not have a good method to classify low risk and high-risk breast cancer patients, most of the patients receive toxic chemotherapies, because your doctor just doesn't know if you are at a very high risk or low risk of breast cancer recurrence.
There are some advances occurring in this field. A new genetic testing called Oncotype-Dx testing has been introduced, and this test together with other tests in development is expected to tell exactly if a woman with breast cancer would require chemotherapy.
Anyhow to come back to the point, these researchers have been examining the genes expressed during breast cancer in order to classify those genes into groups that can reliably predict the outcome of disease. They found that a protein that is found in some breast cancer tumors called alpha-basic-crystallin, predicts poor survival in breast cancer. This predictive value of alpha-basic-crystalline was independently of other known prognostic markers.
Researchers say that alpha-basic-crystallin is overexpressed in mammary epithelial cells and causes dysregulated growth, changes in cell structure, diminished programmed cell death, and the formation of invasive carcinomas that is linked to activation of the ERK/MAPK signaling pathway. These new findings may facilitate research and development of tailored therapies that are active against this signaling pathway. This study was published in the recent issue of Journal of Clinical Investigation. |
