Project description:While new defects in BRCA1 are still being found, it is unclear whether current breast cancer diagnostics misses many BRCA1-associated cases. A reliable test that is able to indicate the involvement of BRCA1 deficiency in cancer genesis could support decision making in genetic counselling and clinical management. To find BRCA1-specific markers and explore the effectiveness of the current diagnostic strategy, we designed a classification method, validated it and examined whether we could find BRCA1-like breast tumours in a group of patients initially diagnosed as non-BRCA1/2 mutation carriers. A classifier was built based on array-CGH profiles of 18 BRCA1-related and 32 control breast tumours, and validated on independent sets of 16 BRCA1-related and 16 control breast carcinomas. Subsequently, we applied the classifier to 48 breast tumours of patients from Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer (HBOC) families in whom no germ line BRCA1/BRCA2 mutations were identified. The classifier showed an accuracy of 91% when applied to the validation sets. In 48 non-BRCA1/2 patients, only two breast tumours presented a BRCA1-like CGH profile. Additional evidence for BRCA1 dysfunction was found in one of these tumours. We here describe the specific chromosomal aberrations in BRCA1-related breast carcinomas. We developed a predictive genetic test for BRCA1-association and show that BRCA1-related tumours can still be identified in HBOC families after routine DNA diagnostics.
Project description:Genomic profile of 47 tumors from hereditary breast cancer cases by Array CGH, 7 of which were BRCA mutation carriers (4 in BRCA2 and 3 in BRCA1), previously analyzed for BRCA1 expression by immunohistochemistry. Our goal was to identify specific alterations for BRCA1 not expressing tumors
Project description:89 tumors from women that were eligible for, and subjected to, routine diagnostic testing according to the HBOC criteria but were negative for pathogenic BRCA1/2-mutations or carried an UV in either BRCA1/2 A BRCA2-classifier was built using array-CGH profiles of 28 BRCA2-mutated and 28 sporadic breast tumors. The classifier was validated on an independent group of 19 BRCA2-mutated and 19 sporadic breast tumors. Subsequently, we tested 89 breast tumors from suspected hereditary breast (and ovarian) cancer (HBOC) families, in which either no BRCA1/2 mutation or an UV had been found by routine diagnostics.
Project description:Genomic profile of 47 tumors from hereditary breast cancer cases by Array CGH, 7 of which were BRCA mutation carriers (4 in BRCA2 and 3 in BRCA1), previously analyzed for BRCA1 expression by immunohistochemistry. Our goal was to identify specific alterations for BRCA1 not expressing tumors DNA from 47 Tumors versus DNA pool from normal tissue. BRCA1 expression, Hierarchical clustering and overall survival analyses.
Project description:Only about 25% of familial breast cancer is explained by mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2, fewer by moderate penetrance genes like P53, PTEN, CHEK2, ATM and PALB2 and an unknown fraction by common variants of genes with low penetrance. Evidence suggests that additional dominant breast cancer genes exist and these are referred to as BRCAX. Clinical presentation of families with highly increased incidence of breast cancer that are non-BRCA1/BRCA2, suggests dominant inheritance of such high penetrance breast cancer genes. Because cancer genes often confer a specific clinical presentation (e.g. age of onset, sex-ratio, tissue spectrum) it seems useful to initiate their discovery by such clinical criteria. An earlier linkage study of BRCAX / non-BRCA1/2 breast cancer families aimed to enrich for a common genetic defect by setting stringent inclusion criteria, failed to identify new breast cancer susceptibility loci. Motivated by results of BRCA1 and BRCA2 breast tumors that have characteristic genomic signatures (array-CGH 'phenotypes'), we present the largest dataset to date showing the genomic profiles of 58 BRCAX primary breast tumors by array-CGH and show by unsupervised hierarchical clustering that they form a heterogeneous group with 4 distinct subtypes that are different from (n = 48) sporadic controls. This provides a possible explanation for the lack of high LOD scores in linkage studies. The presence of more than one BRCAX sub-type suggests the existence of more than one BRCAX gene. We propose approaches that can be employed to stratify BRCAX families based on array-CGH data. 58 primary breast carcinomas from non-BRCA1/2 hereditary breast cancer families (HBC) compared to 48 sporadic tumors
Project description:Inactivating germline BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations confer a defect in homologous recombination DNA repair which was found to leave traces in tumor DNA copy number aberration (CNA) profiles. In analogy to previously trained breast cancer CNA classifiers that predicted association with BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutated cancer and benefit of high dose double strand break inducing chemotherapy, we trained BRCA1 and BRCA2 classifiers on CNA profiles of 50 BRCA1 mutated, 10 BRCA2 mutated and 13 non-familial ovarian cancers and investigated whether tumor type and mutation type independent classifiers could be trained. The cross validated area under the curve of the receiver/operator characteristic curve of ovarian cancer BRCA1 and BRCA2 classifiers were 0.67 (95% CI: 0.55-0.78) and 0.91 (95% CI: 0.79-1). These classifiers identified the majority of the samples with germline and somatic BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations and BRCA1 promoter hypermethylation in the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) dataset. Combining tumor type or mutated gene did not yield higher AUCs than single gene classifiers, although the ovarian BRCA1+BRCA2 classifier identified most BRCA1 and -2 mutated cases, including those in the TCGA dataset, and a combined breast and ovarian cancer BRCA1 classifier may improve response prediction to double strand break inducing chemotherapy.
Project description:The objective of the study was to characterize hereditary breast tumors based on their miRNA expression profiles. To this end, we performed global miRNA expression analysis of more than 800 human miRNA genes in a large series of 80 FFPE breast tissue samples. The series included 66 hereditary breast primary tumors from 13 BRCA1 mutation carriers, 10 BRCA2 mutation carriers and 43 non-BRCA12 tumors denominated hereafter as BRCAX tumors. In addition we have analyzed 10 sporadic breast carcinomas and 4 normal breast tissues obtained after breast reduction surgery from healthy donors with no family history of breast cancer. To avoid contamination with normal breast tissue, tumoral area on FFPE blocks was marked by a pathologist and macrodissected for subsequent total RNA extraction.
Project description:The objective of the study was to characterize hereditary breast tumors based on their miRNA expression profiles. To this end, we performed global miRNA expression analysis of more than 800 human miRNA genes in a large series of 80 FFPE breast tissue samples. The series included 66 hereditary breast primary tumors from 13 BRCA1 mutation carriers, 10 BRCA2 mutation carriers and 43 non-BRCA12 tumors denominated hereafter as BRCAX tumors. In addition we have analyzed 10 sporadic breast carcinomas and 4 normal breast tissues obtained after breast reduction surgery from healthy donors with no family history of breast cancer. To avoid contamination with normal breast tissue, tumoral area on FFPE blocks was marked by a pathologist and macrodissected for subsequent total RNA extraction. Microarray expression profiling was performed using miRCURY LNATM microRNA Array v.11 (Exiqon A/S, Denmark), in a single color experiments in a pairwise comparison experimantal design.
Project description:We used complementary DNA (cDNA) microarrays to compare gene expression patterns in ovarian cancers associated with BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations with gene expression patterns in sporadic epithelial ovarian cancers and to identify patterns common to both hereditary and sporadic tumors.