Medical Genomics Group, Paul O'Gorman Building, UCL Cancer Institute, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, UK.
Breast Cancer Res. 2010;12(6):317. doi: 10.1186/bcr2774. Epub 2010 Dec 8.
A substantial proportion of lymph node-negative patients who receive adjuvant chemotherapy do not derive any benefit from this aggressive and potentially toxic treatment. However, standard histopathological indices cannot reliably detect patients at low risk of relapse or distant metastasis. In the past few years several prognostic gene expression signatures have been developed and shown to potentially outperform histopathological factors in identifying low-risk patients in specific breast cancer subgroups with predictive values of around 90%, and therefore hold promise for clinical application. We envisage that further improvements and insights may come from integrative expression pathway analyses that dissect prognostic signatures into modules related to cancer hallmarks.
相当一部分接受辅助化疗的淋巴结阴性患者并未从中获益，尽管这种治疗方法具有侵袭性且潜在毒性。然而，标准的组织病理学指标并不能可靠地检测出复发或远处转移风险低的患者。在过去的几年中，已经开发出了几种预后基因表达特征，并显示出在特定乳腺癌亚组中识别低风险患者方面可能优于组织病理学因素，其预测值约为 90%，因此具有临床应用的潜力。我们预计，进一步的改进和深入研究可能来自于将预后特征分解为与癌症标志相关模块的综合表达途径分析。
