Tumor Banks: A Quality Control Scheme Proposal.

Tumor banks make a considerable contribution to translational research. Using emerging molecular tests on frozen material facilitates the development of new diagnostic and therapeutic strategies, especially in rare cases. However, standard quality control schemes are lacking in the current literature.

SET: a robust 18-gene predictor for sensitivity to endocrine therapy for metastatic breast cancer.

There is a clinical need to predict sensitivity of metastatic hormone receptor-positive and HER2-negative (HR+/HER2-) breast cancer to endocrine therapy, and targeted RNA sequencing (RNAseq) offers diagnostic potential to measure both transcriptional activity and functional mutation. We developed the SET index to measure gene expression microarray probe sets that were correlated with hormone receptors ( and ) and robust to preanalytical and analytical influences. We tested SET index in biopsies of metastastic HR+/HER2- breast cancer against the treatment outcomes in 140 patients.

Distinctive Desmoplastic 3D Morphology Associated With BRAFV600E in Papillary Thyroid Cancers.

Context: Although 60% of papillary thyroid carcinomas are BRAFV600E mutant (PTCV600E), the increased aggressiveness of these cancers is still debated.

Objective: For PTCV600E we aimed to further characterize the extent of the stroma and its activation, the three-dimensional (3D) tumor-stroma interface, and the proliferation rates of tumor and stromal fibroblasts.

Design: We analyzed exomes, transcriptomes, and images of 364 papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTCs) from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), including 211 PTCV600E; stained 22 independent PTCs for BRAFV600E and Ki67; sequenced the exomes and stained BRAFV600E in 5 primary tumor blocks and 4 nodal metastases from one patient with PTCV600E; and reconstructed the 3D volumes of one tumor and one metastatic block at histological resolution.

Somatic mutation, copy number and transcriptomic profiles of primary and matched metastatic estrogen receptor-positive breast cancers.

Background: Estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancers (BCs) constitute the most frequent BC subtype. The molecular landscape of ER+ relapsed disease is not well characterized. In this study, we aimed to describe the genomic evolution between primary (P) and matched metastatic (M) ER+ BCs after failure of adjuvant therapy.

ERα dimerization: a key factor for the weak estrogenic activity of an ERα modulator unable to compete with estradiol in binding assays.

Estrothiazine (ESTZ) is a weak estrogen sharing structural similarities with coumestrol. ESTZ failed to compete with [H]17β-estradiol ([H]17β-E) for binding to the estrogen receptor α (ERα), questioning its ability to interact with the receptor. However, detection by atomic force spectroscopy (AFS) of an ESTZ-induced ERα dimerization has eliminated any remaining doubts.