Expression analysis of novel biomarkers for breast cancer

Excerpt

Cancer Research UK (2007) [1] stated that the most common cancer for women in the United Kingdom is breast cancer. In 2004, about 20% of all breast cancer cases diagnosed would lead to death [2]. The accepted prognostic factors fail to establish accurately the outcome for breast cancer patients as a large proportion of those diagnosed with invasive breast carcinomas are given aggressive treatments even though many of them are unlikely to develop a life-threatening cancer even without therapies. Over the past decade, many genetic and molecular pathways have been associated with breast cancer. To progress towards personalized therapies, there is a need for novel bio-markers for diagnosis, for the detection of metastasis and as targets for new selective immunotherapies. The BUC genes (Breast UniGene Cluster) are novel breast-associated genes identified on the basis of their specific expression spectrum, which includes testis, normal breast and breast cancer tissue. During in silico analysis of the BUC gene sequence, we discovered that the BUC11 gene sequence shares significant similarity with the gene sequence of an unpublished gene that codes for a predicted protein (source data obtained from the NCBI website [3]). …