乳腺癌的基因表达检测方法

 
已经研制开发的几种基因表达检测方法，能够对癌症患者进行预测，特别是乳腺癌，但是检测发现设计的基因很少有重叠，目前尚不清楚这些不同检测方法的明显区别。

个体肿瘤基因活性能够作为预测因子，诸如肿瘤的侵袭性，对不同治疗的反应，是否会复发或者扩散。为了比较不同基因检测方法的预测价值，北卡罗来那州大学(UNC)医学院(Chapel Hill, NC, USA)基因和病理学助理教授Charles M. Perou医生和他的同事，研究了5种不同预测因子的一致性，这些因子被应用在能够得到患者生存资料的295例肿瘤样本中。

在2006年8月10日《新英格兰医学期刊》上，研究人员指出4种预测因子，在个体乳腺癌患者的转归预测方面，显示出"显著的一致性"，尽管很少有基因重叠。其中3种预测因子一致性最高，两种是商品化的检测方法，正在用于指导临床试验。
 
Gene-Expression Assays for Breast Cancer Concur
 
A number of gene-expression assays have been developed that appear to be predictive for cancer patients, especially breast cancer patients, but tests show very little overlap in the genes involved and it is not known how distinct these different assays might be.

Activity patterns in the genes of individual tumors can be predictors of how likely the tumors are to be invasive, how well they might respond to different treatments, and how likely they are to recur or spread. To compare the individual predictions made by different genomic tests, Dr. Charles M. Perou, assistant professor of genetics and pathology at the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Medicine (Chapel Hill, NC, USA), and colleagues studied the concordance of five different predictors that were all applied to a single data set of 295 tumor samples for which patient survival data were available.

Writing in the August 10, 2006, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers note that four predictors showed "significant agreement" in their outcome predictions on individual breast cancer patients, despite having little gene overlap. Of the three predictors showing the greatest concordance, two were the main assays that are commercially available and being used to guide clinical trials.