The efficacy of chemotherapy regimens in breast cancer patients is variable and unpredictable. Whether individual patients either achieve long-term remission or suffer recurrence after therapy may be dictated by intrinsic properties of their breast tumors including genetic lesions and consequent aberrant transcriptional programs. Canadian researchers have shown that DNA chip based gene expression profiling can be used for assessing the success of chemotherapy for breast cancer. They used gene expression profiling to identify genes that were co-expressed with genes whose transcripts encode the protein targets of commonly used chemotherapeutic agents. Based on expression profiling of anthracycline and taxane based chemotherapy response target based expression indices that predict breast tumor response to these drugs were identified. These gene expression signatures were independently predictive of chemotherapy response after adjusting for standard clinic-pathological variables such as age, grade, and estrogen receptor status in a cohort of 488 breast cancer patients treated with adriamycin and taxotere/taxol. This study shows that a practical method for assessing the success of chemotherapy can be developed using gene expression profiling.
(More explanation about DNA chip, expression profiling etc will be added in future posts)
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