Abstract
Breast cancer is the most common malignancy afflicting women from Western cultures. Developments in breast cancer molecular and cellular biology research have brought us closer to understanding the genetic basis of this disease. Recent advances in microarray technology hold the promise of further increasing our understanding of the complexity and heterogeneity of this disease, and providing new avenues for the prognostication and prediction of breast cancer outcomes. These new technologies have some limitations and have yet to be incorporated into clinical use, for both the diagnosis and treatment of women with breast cancer. The most recent application of microarray genomic technologies to studying breast cancer is the focus of this review.
Highlights
Mortality from breast cancer results from the ability of some tumors to metastasize to distant sites
This study suggests that important differences in outcome can be ascertained from microarray expression profiling
The goal of comprehensive, genome-wide approaches is to identify clinically useful genetic profiles that will accurately predict the outcome of therapy and the prognosis of patients with breast cancer
Summary
Mortality from breast cancer results from the ability of some tumors to metastasize to distant sites. Selecting patients with micrometastases at diagnosis is crucial for clinicians in deciding who should and who should not receive toxic and expensive adjuvant chemotherapy to eradicate these metastatic cells. The management of breast cancer has changed, with most node-negative patients undergoing systemic adjuvant therapy because we cannot precisely determine an individual’s risk of recurrence. There is a crucial need to identify patients with a sufficiently low risk of breast cancer recurrence to avoid further treatment. In patients at risk of recurrence and in need of therapy, optimal therapeutic selection is an increasingly important objective. Recent developments in applying microarray technologies to breast tumor samples suggest that these new techniques might provide for the transition of molecular biological discoveries to clinical application, and will generate clinically useful genomic profiles that more accurately predict longterm outcome for individual breast cancer patients
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