articleJNCI Journal of the National Cancer InstituteFeb 14, 2006BRONZE OA

Gene Expression Profiling in Breast Cancer: Understanding the Molecular Basis of Histologic Grade To Improve Prognosis

SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics · Université Libre de Bruxelles · +8 more institutions

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Abstract

Background

Histologic grade in breast cancer provides clinically important prognostic information. However, 30%–60% of tumors are classified as histologic grade 2. This grade is associated with an intermediate risk of recurrence and is thus not informative for clinical decision making. We examined whether histologic grade was associated with gene expression profiles of breast cancers and whether such profiles could be used to improve histologic grading.

Methods

We analyzed microarray data from 189 invasive breast carcinomas and from three published gene expression datasets from breast carcinomas. We identified differentially expressed genes in a training set of 64 estrogen receptor (ER)–positive tumor samples by comparing expression profiles between histologic grade 3 tumors and histologic grade 1 tumors and used the expression of these genes to define the gene expression grade index. Data from 597 independent tumors were used to evaluate the association between relapse-free survival and the gene expression grade index in a Kaplan–Meier analysis. All statistical tests were two-sided.

Citation impact

2,127
total citations
FWCI
50.09
Percentile
100%
References
32
Citations per year

Authors

20

Topics & keywords

Keywords
  • Grading (engineering)
  • Breast cancer
  • Gene expression profiling
  • Gene expression
  • Medicine
  • Pathology
  • Proliferative index
  • Oncology
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