Combination of Multiple mRNA Markers (PTTG1, Survivin, UbcH10 and TK1) in the Diagnosis of Taiwanese Patients with Breast Cancer by Membrane Array

Abstract

Objective: Early detection is a prerequisite to the effective reduction of morbidity and mortality from breast cancer. The present study intended to employ a high-throughput membrane array to detect a panel of mRNA markers expressed by circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in the peripheral blood of female patients with breast cancer. Methods: Peripheral blood was sampled from 92 breast cancer patients and 100 normal persons. CTCs were detected by using a membrane array technique. The markers used included the pituitary tumor transforming gene 1, survivin, UbcH10 and thymidine kinase 1. Results: The results showed that the membrane array could positively detect 5 cancer cells per 1 ml of peripheral blood in breast cancer cell dilution experiments. For the panel of 4 mRNA markers, sensitivity and specificity were elevated up to 86 and 88%, respectively. Furthermore, it was found that the patients’ clinicopathological characteristics tumor size (p = 0.006), histologic grade (p = 0.012), lymph node metastasis (p = 0.001) and TNM stage (p = 0.006) significantly correlated with the positive detection rate of the multimarker panel. Conclusions: These findings demonstrated that our multimarker membrane array method could detect CTCs in the circulation of breast cancer patients with considerably high sensitivity and specificity.

The prognostic role of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) detected by RT-PCR in breast cancer: a meta-analysis of published literature

“…Soon thereafter, various methods have been described for their detection, including PCR-based strategies that increase the chances of distinguishing CTCs from the cellular background of normal cells and are currently considered the most sensitive techniques for detecting CTCs [3]. Many authors [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] have demonstrated that a CTC-positive status is associated with poor clinical outcome and may, therefore, play an important role in the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer patients. However, other studies [18][19][20][21][22] failed to show such an association between the presence of CTCs and poor clinical outcome and prognosis.…”

Association of clinicopathological features with UbcH10 expression in colorectal cancer

“…Current studies have suggested the critical role of UbcH10 in the spindle assembly checkpoint and the subsequent accurate separation of sister chromatids (Reddy et al 2007;Rape and Kirschner 2004), which is orchestrated by a series of molecular interactions governed by the complex and diverse cell-cycle machinery (Yu et al 1996;Townsley et al 1997). Recently, aberrantly high UbcH10 expression has been demonstrated in a variety of malignancies, such as thyroid carcinoma, astrocytic tumors, breast cancer and lymphomas (Lee et al 2008;Jiang et al 2008;Chen et al 2006;Berlingieri et al 2007;Troncone et al 2009;Fujita et al 2009). However, its role in colorectal cancer carcinogenesis and tumor progression has not been well defined.…”

MMP13 is potentially a new tumor marker for breast cancer diagnosis

“…The procedure of the membrane-array method for the detection of multiple genes simultaneously was performed based on our previous work (18)(19)(20). Visual OMP3 (Oligonucleotide Modeling Platform, DNA Software, Ann Arbor, MI) was used to design probes for each target gene and ß-actin, and the latter served as an internal control (Table II).…”