Prognostic relevance of gene amplifications and coamplifications in breast cancer.

Multiple different oncogenes have been described previously to be amplified in breast cancer including HER2, EGFR, MYC, CCND1, and MDM2. Gene amplification results in oncogene overexpression but may also serve as an indicator of genomic instability. As such, presence of one or several gene amplifications may have prognostic significance.

High Ep-CAM expression is associated with poor prognosis in node-positive breast cancer.

Previous studies in small series of patients with invasive breast cancer suggested a prognostic value of Ep-CAM overexpression in primary tumor tissue. To corroborate these findings, we performed a retrospective analysis of Ep-CAM expression using a tissue microarray containing tissue specimens from a large patient set. Ep-CAM expression was evaluated by immunohistochemistry in breast cancer tissue from 1715 patients with documented raw survival data.

Expression of cytokeratins 17 and 5 identifies a group of breast carcinomas with poor clinical outcome.

While several prognostic factors have been identified in breast carcinoma, the clinical outcome remains hard to predict for individual patients. Better predictive markers are needed to help guide difficult treatment decisions. In a previous study of 78 breast carcinoma specimens, we noted an association between poor clinical outcome and the expression of cytokeratin 17 and/or cytokeratin 5 mRNAs.

Telomerase as a prognostic marker in breast cancer: high-throughput tissue microarray analysis of hTERT and hTR.

Telomerase activity (TA) has been shown to correlate with poor clinical outcome in various tumour entities, indicating that tumours expressing this enzyme may be more aggressive and that TA may be a useful prognostic marker. For breast cancer, however, TA is a controversial prognostic marker; whereas some studies suggest an association between TA and disease outcome, others do not find this association. This study used tissue microarrays (breast carcinoma prognosis arrays) containing 611 samples (each 0.

Tissue microarrays for rapid linking of molecular changes to clinical endpoints.

Advances in genomics and proteomics are dramatically increasing the need to evaluate large numbers of molecular targets for their diagnostic, predictive or prognostic value in clinical oncology. Conventional molecular pathology techniques are often tedious, time-consuming, and require a lot of tissue, thereby limiting both the number of tissues and the number of targets that can be evaluated. Here, we demonstrate the power of our recently described tissue microarray (TMA) technology in analyzing prognostic markers in a series of 553 breast carcinomas.