Project description:Breast cancer is a heterogeneous disease for which prognosis and treatment strategies are largely governed by the receptor status (estrogen, progesterone and Her2-neu) of the tumor cells. Gene expression profiling of whole breast tumors further stratifies breast cancer into several molecular subtypes which also co-segregate with the receptor status of the tumor cells. We postulated that cancer associated fibroblasts (CAFs) within the tumor stroma may exhibit subtype specific gene expression profiles and thus contribute to the biology of the disease in a subtype specific manner. Several studies have reported gene expression profile differences between CAFs and normal breast fibroblasts but in none of these studies were the results stratified based on tumor subtypes. To address whether gene expression in breast cancer associated fibroblasts varies between breast cancer subtypes, we compared the gene expression profiles of early passage primary CAFs isolated from twenty human breast cancer samples representing three main subtypes; seven ER+, seven triple negative (TNBC) and six Her2+. We observed significant expression differences between CAFs derived from Her2+ breast cancer and CAFs from TNBC and ER+ cancers, particularly in pathways associated with cytoskeleton and integrin signaling. In the case of Her2+ breast cancer, the signaling pathways found to be selectively up regulated in CAFs may contribute to the more invasive properties and unfavorable prognosis of Her2+ breast cancer. These data demonstrate that in addition to the distinct molecular profiles that characterize the neoplastic cells, CAF gene expression is also differentially regulated in distinct subtypes of breast cancer. We isolated CAFs from twenty primary breast cancer samples representing three main subtypes (ER+ (n=7), TNBC (n=7), Her2+ (n=6)) and performed gene expression profile analyses on RNA isolated from these early passage CAFs. Those samples were done in two batches with 4 samples repeated in both batches. One TNBC sample was found to be an outlier and not used in the analysis.

Project description:Breast cancer is a profoundly heterogeneous disease with respect to biological and clinical behavior. Gene expression profiling has been used to dissect this complexity and stratify tumors into intrinsic gene expression subtypes associated with distinct biology, patient outcome and different genomic alterations. Additionally, breast tumors occurring in individuals with germline BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations typically fall into distinct subtypes. We applied global DNA copy number and gene expression profiling in 359 breast tumors. All tumors were classified according to intrinsic gene expression subtypes and included cases from genetically predisposed women. The Genomic Identification of Significant Targets in Cancer (GISTIC) algorithm was used to identify significant DNA copy number aberrations and genomic subgroups of breast cancer. We identified 31 genomic regions that were highly amplified in >1% of the 359 breast tumors. Several amplicons were found to co-occur, the 8p12 and 11q13.3 regions being the most frequent combination besides amplicons on the same chromosomal arm. Unsupervised hierarchical clustering with 133 significant GISTIC regions (66 and 67 with DNA copy number gain and loss, respectively) revealed six genomic subtypes, termed: 17q12, basal-complex, luminal-simple, luminal-complex, amplifier and mixed subtype. Four of them had striking similarity to intrinsic gene expression subtypes and showed association to conventional tumor biomarkers and clinical outcome. However, luminal A-classified tumors were distributed in two main genomic subtypes, luminal-simple and luminal-complex, the former group having better prognosis while the latter group included also luminal B and the majority of BRCA2-mutated tumors. The basal-complex subtype displayed extensive genomic homogeneity and harbored the majority of BRCA1-mutated tumors. The 17q12 subtype comprised mostly HER2-amplified and HER2-enriched subtype tumors and had the worst prognosis. The amplifier and mixed subtypes contained tumors from all gene expression subtypes, the former being enriched for 8p12-amplified cases while the mixed subtype included many tumors with predominantly DNA copy number losses and poor prognosis. Genomic profiling of 359 breast tumors using tiling BAC aCGH. A number of cases were hybridized as replicates or replicate as dye-swaps. Gene expression profiling of 359 breast tumors using 55K oligonucleotide microarrays.

Project description:Introduction: Five different molecular subtypes of breast cancer have been identified through gene expression profiling. Each subtype has a characteristic expression pattern suggested to partly depend on cellular origin. We aimed to investigate whether the molecular subtypes also display distinct methylation profiles. Methods: We analysed methylation status of 807 cancer-related genes in 189 fresh frozen primary breast tumours and four normal breast tissue samples using an array-based methylation assay. Results: Unsupervised analysis revealed three groups of breast cancer with characteristic methylation patterns. The three groups were associated with the luminal A, luminal B and basal-like molecular subtypes of breast cancer, respectively, whereas cancers of the HER2-enriched and normal-like subtypes were distributed among the three groups. The methylation frequencies were significantly different between subtypes, with luminal B and basal-like tumours being most and least frequently methylated, respectively. Moreover, targets of the polycomb repressor complex in breast cancer and embryonic stem cells were more methylated in luminal B tumours than in other tumours. BRCA2-mutated tumours had a particularly high degree of methylation. Finally, by utilizing gene expression data, we observed that a large fraction of genes reported as having subtype-specific expression patterns might be regulated through methylation. Conclusions: We have found that breast cancers of the basal-like, luminal A and luminal B molecular subtypes harbour specific methylation profiles. Our results suggest that methylation may play an important role in the development of breast cancers. DNA methylation profiling of breast cancer samples and normal breast tissue samples. The Illumina GoldenGate Methylation Cancer Panel I was used to obtain DNA methylation profiles across approximately 1500 CpGs. Samples included 189 breast cancer samples and 4 normal breast tissue samples. Bisulphite converted DNA from the samples were hybridised to the Illumina GoldenGate Methylation Cancer Panel I

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