Emerging high-throughput screening technologies are rapidly providing opportunities to identify new diagnostic and prognostic markers and new therapeutic targets in human cancer. Currently, cDNA arrays allow the quantitative measurement of thousands of mRNA expression levels simultaneously. Validation of this tool in hospital settings can be done on large series of archival paraffin-embedded tumor samples using the new technique of tissue microarray. On a series of 55 clinically and pathologically homogeneous breast tumors, we compared for 15 molecules with a proven or suspected role in breast cancer, the mRNA expression levels measured by cDNA array analysis with protein expression levels obtained using tumor tissue microarrays. The validity of cDNA array and tissue microarray data were first verified by comparison with quantitative reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction measurements and immunohistochemistry on full tissue sections, respectively. We found a good correlation between cDNA and tissue array analyses in one-third of the 15 molecules, and no correlation in the remaining twothirds. Furthermore, protein but not RNA levels may have prognostic value; this was the case for MUC1 protein, which was studied further using a tissue microarray containing ϳ600 tumor samples. For THBS1 the opposite was observed because only RNA levels had prognostic value. Thus, differences extended to clinical prognostic information obtained by the two methods underlining their complementarity and the need for a global molecular analysis of tumors at both the RNA and protein levels.

The human FLT3 cDNA was cloned from a pre-B cell line and characterized. The deduced amino acid sequence shows that FLT3 codes for a receptor-type tyrosine kinase of 993 residues, presenting a strong similarity with the corresponding mouse FLT3/FLK2 protein as well as with the receptors for colony-stimulating factor 1 (CSF1R/FMS) and steel locus factor (SLFR/KIT). An analysis of the expression of the gene using amplification of reverse transcribed FLT3 mRNA by polymerase chain reaction shows that FLT3 is expressed in various lymphohematopoietic cells and tissues, including a series of immature cell lines and leukemias of lymphocytic origin.

Purpose: Cancer stem cells (CSC) are the tumorigenic cell population that has been shown to sustain tumor growth and to resist conventional therapies. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the potential of histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDACi) as anti-CSC therapies.Experimental Design: We evaluated the effect of the HDACi compound abexinostat on CSCs from 16 breast cancer cell lines (BCL) using ALDEFLUOR assay and tumorsphere formation. We performed gene expression profiling to identify biomarkers predicting drug response to abexinostat. Then, we used patientderived xenograft (PDX) to confirm, in vivo, abexinostat treatment effect on breast CSCs according to the identified biomarkers.Results: We identified two drug-response profiles to abexinostat in BCLs. Abexinostat induced CSC differentiation in low-dose sensitive BCLs, whereas it did not have any effect on the CSC population from high-dose sensitive BCLs. Using gene expression profiling, we identified the long noncoding RNA Xist (Xinactive specific transcript) as a biomarker predicting BCL response to HDACi. We validated that low Xist expression predicts drug response in PDXs associated with a significant reduction of the breast CSC population.Conclusions: Our study opens promising perspectives for the use of HDACi as a differentiation therapy targeting the breast CSCs and identified a biomarker to select patients with breast cancer susceptible to responding to this treatment.