Despite their generally favorable prognosis, luminal A tumors paradoxically pose the highest ten-year recurrence risk among breast cancers. From those that relapse, a quarter of them do it within five years after diagnosis. Identifying such patients is crucial, as long-term relapsers could benefit from extended hormone therapy, whereas early relapsers may require aggressive treatment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCardiotoxicity due to anthracyclines (CDA) affects cancer patients, but we cannot predict who may suffer from this complication. CDA is a complex disease whose polygenic component is mainly unidentified. We propose that levels of intermediate molecular phenotypes in the myocardium associated with histopathological damage could explain CDA susceptibility; so that variants of genes encoding these intermediate molecular phenotypes could identify patients susceptible to this complication.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSNAI2 overexpression appears to be associated with poor prognosis in breast cancer, yet it remains unclear in which breast cancer subtypes this occurs. Here we show that excess SNAI2 is associated with a poor prognosis of luminal B HER2/ERBB2 breast cancers in which SNAI2 expression in the stroma but not the epithelium correlates with tumor proliferation. To determine how stromal SNAI2 might influence HER2 tumor behavior, -deficient mice were crossed with a mouse line carrying the protooncogene to generate HER2/ERBB2 breast cancer.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe data presented in this article are related to the research paper entitled "The biological age linked to oxidative stress modifies breast cancer aggressiveness" (M.M. Sáez-Freire, A.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe incidence of breast cancer increases with age until menopause, and breast cancer is more aggressive in younger women. The existence of epidemiological links between breast cancer and aging indicates that both processes share some common mechanisms of development. Oxidative stress is associated with both cancer susceptibility and aging.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDiseases of complex origin have a component of quantitative genetics that contributes to their susceptibility and phenotypic variability. However, after several studies, a major part of the genetic component of complex phenotypes has still not been found, a situation known as "missing heritability." Although there have been many hypotheses put forward to explain the reasons for the missing heritability, its definitive causes remain unknown.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: An essential question in cancer is why individuals with the same disease have different clinical outcomes. Progress toward a more personalized medicine in cancer patients requires taking into account the underlying heterogeneity at different molecular levels.
Results: Here, we present a model in which there are complex interactions at different cellular and systemic levels that account for the heterogeneity of susceptibility to and evolution of ERBB2-positive breast cancers.
Recently, it has been suggested that C2ORF40 is a candidate tumor suppressor gene in breast cancer. However, the mechanism for reduced expression of C2ORF40 and its functional role in breast cancers remain unclear. Here we show that C2ORF40 is frequently silenced in human primary breast cancers and cell lines through promoter hypermethylation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFBXW7 acts as a tumor suppressor through ubiquitination and degradation of multiple oncoproteins. Loss of FBXW7 expression, which could be partially attributed by the genomic deletion or mutation of FBXW7 locus, is frequently observed in various human cancers. However, the mechanisms regulating FBXW7 expression still remain poorly understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCancer is the subject of intense research around the world, but many questions about how the disease works remain unanswered. How exactly does cancer start and how do tumours grow? In fact, at present there are ten times more anticancer drugs being tested in clinical trials than there were 15 years ago. However, many of the new anticancer agents are predicted to show clinical benefit in only small subpopulations of patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCancer susceptibility is due to interactions between inherited genetic factors and exposure to environmental carcinogens. The genetic component is constituted mainly by weakly acting low-penetrance genetic variants that interact among themselves, as well as with the environment. These low susceptibility genes can be categorized into two main groups: one includes those that control intrinsic tumor cell activities (i.
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