De Henny C. Dirven Prijs Henny C. Dirven Prijs . It is invasion and metastasis that causes therapy failure in breast cancer.
Invasion is therefore a major challenge for therapy.
Agents that shift the balance towards invasion-suppression may have great therapeutic value. In breast cancer, reduced expression of E-cadherin is associated with invasiveness and loss of differentiation characteristics. In order to study the aberrant downregulation in tumors the human E-cadherin gene was cloned. The gene spans a region of approximately 100 kb, and its location on chromosome 16q22.1 was determined. In total 98 sporadic breast cancers were analyzed for the presence of E-cadherin inactivating mutations.