Prioritizing targets

Swami, Meera

doi:10.1038/nrc2684

Research Highlight
Published: July 2009

Breast cancer

Prioritizing targets

Meera Swami

Nature Reviews Cancer volume 9, pages 458–459 (2009)Cite this article

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Chinnaiyan and colleagues reasoned that genes which show the largest changes in expression in cancer (ranging from a 10-fold to over a 100-fold increase relative tobaseline expression) might have a direct role in cancer progression. They combined two approaches that have previously been separately applied to identify cancer genes — cancer outlier profile analysis and meta-analysis. Using this new method to analyse 31 breast cancer profiling data sets, which comprised ∼3,200 microarray experiments, they identified 159 genes that were overexpressed in a significant fraction of the data sets (meta-outliers).

The authors found that ERBB2 was the most significant meta-outlier, consistent with the fact that this gene is overexpressed in 25–30% of breast tumours. The next most significant meta-outlier was AGTR1, which has previously been linked to cancer. AGTR1 overexpression was restricted to a subset of oestrogen receptor-positive tumours and was mutually exclusive of ERBB2 overexpression.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER

Rhodes, D. R. et al. AGTR1 overexpression defines a subset of breast cancer and confers sensitivity to losartan, an AGTR1 antagonist. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 1 Jun 2009 (doi: 10.1073/pnas.0900351106)

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