Expression Patterns Of The Erbb2 Gene And Its Splice Variant In Mammary Tissues And Their Associations With Breast Risk And Survival

Alternative splicing generates different transcripts from the same precursor mRNA. ERBB2 proto-oncogene is involved in the growth, invasion, and prognosis of breast cancer. The ERBB2-sp is a splice variant of ERBB2 that lacks the intracellular and transmembrane domains, which may alter the function of the ERBB2 gene. We hypothesize that the ERBB2-sp and the wild type ERBB2 gene may play a different role in the development and prognosis of breast cancer, and thus compared ERBB2 and ERBB2-sp mRNA expression in tumor tissue and adjacent non-tumor tissue in both breast cancer patients and benign breast disease (BBD) patients. Included in the study were 515 patients diagnosed with breast cancer and 206 patients diagnosed with BBD. These women were recruited as part of the Shanghai Breast Cancer Study and they provided samples of tumor tissue and adjacent non-tumor tissue to the study. Tumor tissues from patients with breast cancer had substantially higher levels of ERBB2 expression than those from patients with BBD (81vs 37, P Citation Format: {Authors}. {Abstract title} [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 101st Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2010 Apr 17-21; Washington, DC. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2010;70(8 Suppl):Abstract nr 2781.