Prieto Diego, Rondón-Lagos Milena, Cruz-Tapias Paola, Rincón-Riveros Andrés, Rubiano Wilson, De la Peña Jairo, Vargas Elizabeth, Villegas Victoria E, Rangel Nelson
School of Biological Sciences, Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia, 150003, Tunja, Colombia.
Department of Cardiology, Fundación Cardioinfantil, LaCardio, 1113111, Bogota, Colombia.
Sci Rep. 2025 Jul 1;15(1):21793. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-06856-3.
The role of the androgen receptor (AR) in breast cancer (BC) remains incompletely understood. Here, we conducted a meta-analysis of large-scale microarray transcriptomic datasets to evaluate whether the mRNA expression levels of the androgen receptor gene, relative to those of the estrogen receptor gene (AR/ESR1 ratio) and the progesterone receptor gene (AR/PGR ratio), can help differentiate BC tumor subtypes. Additionally, we used qRT-PCR assays to assess the mRNA levels of the AR/ESR1 and AR/PGR ratios in four cell lines representative of different BC subtypes (MCF7, BT474, MDA-MB453, and MDA-MB231), as well as in breast tissue from a small group of patients (11 cases) stratified by estrogen receptor (ER) status. Our results showed that higher AR gene expression relative to ESR1 and PGR (≥ 2.0 and ≥ 1.54, respectively) were associated with BC patients classified under the Luminal B and HER2-enriched subtypes. Positive values of AR/ESR1 and AR/PGR ratios were also observed in the ER-negative (ER-) cell line MDA-MB453, as well as in tumor tissue from ER- BC patients. Our findings confirm that higher or even positive AR/ESR1 and AR/PGR ratios may be associated with BC cases exhibiting more aggressive clinical and biological features, leading to a worse prognosis.
雄激素受体（AR）在乳腺癌（BC）中的作用仍未完全明确。在此，我们对大规模微阵列转录组数据集进行了荟萃分析，以评估雄激素受体基因的mRNA表达水平相对于雌激素受体基因（AR/ESR1比值）和孕激素受体基因（AR/PGR比值），是否有助于区分BC肿瘤亚型。此外，我们使用qRT-PCR检测评估了代表不同BC亚型的四种细胞系（MCF7、BT474、MDA-MB453和MDA-MB231）以及一小群按雌激素受体（ER）状态分层的患者（11例）的乳腺组织中AR/ESR1和AR/PGR比值的mRNA水平。我们的结果表明，相对于ESR1和PGR，更高的AR基因表达（分别≥2.0和≥1.54）与归类为Luminal B和HER2富集亚型的BC患者相关。在ER阴性（ER-）细胞系MDA-MB453以及ER-BC患者的肿瘤组织中也观察到AR/ESR1和AR/PGR比值为正值。我们的研究结果证实，更高甚至正值的AR/ESR1和AR/PGR比值可能与表现出更具侵袭性的临床和生物学特征、预后更差的BC病例相关。
