Abstract 2577: Expression of P53/PTEN/c-Myc in peripheral blood leukocytes from patients with breast cancer and its clinical significance
Authors: Huang Guangcheng , Ma Qiang , Zou Jiang , Sun Ru , Yao Lihua , Xu Lei , Wang Dongsheng , Guo Xiaolan 
Published: July 2017

Breast cancer remains the most frequently diagnosed malignancy and leading cause of cancer deaths in women worldwide. Current data showed that the morbidity of breast cancer has been rising shifting with younger age in the last decades, therefore early detection is urgently needed to improve the management of breast cancer as what has been working on many other malignancies. Dysfunction of tumor suppressor gene and/or oncogene might play vital roles in tumorigenesis and cancer progression, such as P53, PTEN and c-Myc. In this study we aim to detect the expression of P53/PTEN/c-Myc mRNA in peripheral blood leukocytes from patients with breast cancer and benign breast diseases, and investigate its correlation with the clinicopathologic characteristics, further to explore the potential clinical application significance.

In this study, fluorescent quantitation Real-time Polymerase Chain Reaction (FQ-RT-PCR) was employed to detect the expression of P53/PTEN/c-Myc mRNA in peripheral blood leukocytes from 304 cases, including 105 patients with breast cancer, 107 cases of benign breast diseases and 92 healthy women as control. 2-ΔΔCT was used to calculate the relative quantitative gene expression and Mann-whitney U test was carried to distinguish the differences among the independent cohorts. The results showed that P53 and PTEN mRNA were significantly reduced in both breast cancer group and benign breast diseases group, respectively(P&lt;0.01), moreover, the P53 mRNA in benign breast diseases was even lower than that in breast cancer(P&lt;0.01). However, c-Myc didn’t show any obvious difference among the three groups. Further investigation the genes expression with clinicopathologic characteristics, we found that PTEN in patients with breast cancer was correlated with lymph nodes metastasis and clinical stage as well. Among those breast cancer patients without lymph node metastasis, the level of PTEN mRNA in peripheral blood leukocytes was obviously lower than that in patients with metastatic lymph node positive (P&lt;0.05), on the other hand, breast cancer patients with ductal carcinoma in situ and earlier stages(0+I+II) showed lower PTEN mRNA than those in later or advanced stages (III+IV) (P=0.01).

Above results indicated that P53 and PTEN mRNA in peripheral blood leukocytes displayed apparent difference among patients with breast cancer, benign breast diseases and healthy control, and dysregulation of P53/PTEN was found in patients with benign breast diseases, even more obvious than that in breast cancer patients. Moreover, down-regulation of PTEN might predict and/or display the early events of breast cancer carcinogenesis and lymph nodes metastasis. Our findings suggest that detection of tumor related genes in peripheral blood leukocytes would serve as a unique potential approach in early and noninvasive diagnosis of tumors, also would be very promising in clinical applications as well.

Note: This abstract was not presented at the meeting.

Citation Format: Guangcheng Huang, Qiang Ma, Jiang Zou, Ru Sun, Lihua Yao, Lei Xu, Dongsheng Wang, Xiaolan Guo. Expression of P53/PTEN/c-Myc in peripheral blood leukocytes from patients with breast cancer and its clinical significance [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2017; 2017 Apr 1-5; Washington, DC. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2017;77(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 2577. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2017-2577