Patent ID: 10316361

Abstract:
To better understand the biology of hormone receptor-positive and negative breast cancer and to identify methylated gene markers of disease progression, a genome-wide methylation array analysis was performed on 103 primary invasive breast cancers and 21 normal breast samples using the Illumina Infinium HumanMethylation27 array that queried 27,578 CpG loci. Forty CpG loci showed differential methylation specific to either ER-positive or ER-negative tumors. Each of the 40 ER-subtype-specific loci was validated in silico using an independent, publicly available methylome dataset from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). In addition, 100 methylated CpG loci were identified that were significantly associated with disease progression. Arrays containing the ER-subtype-specific loci and their use in methods of diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer are provided.