Recently, the research group led by HUANG Jingfei from Kunming Institute of Zoology of CAS achieved a new progress in the research of breast cancer TRNS(transcriptional regulatory network). They have revealed the heterogeneity of TRNS in different organizations of breast cancer. It provides valuable information for the targeted therapy of breast cancer. The research result has been published on Oncotarget on Dec. 27^th, 2016.

Breast cancer is the most common malignant tumor in the world. The epidemiologic study shows that the morbidity of breast cancer has been increased by 3.1% in recent years. And it is still the leading cause of cancer death among women. In 2002, there were about 522,000 women died of breast cancer, among them 234,000 are in developing countries which accounted for 14.3% of all cancer deaths. A large number of studies have shown that transcription factor plays the key role in the proliferation, invasion and metastasis of breast cancer cell. Cross-organization gene expression comparison in disease can help people understand the global regulation relationship and reveal new candidate genes which can be used as appropriate drug target. Although some abnormal metabolic pathway, potential biomarkers and drug target genes in breast cancer have been revealed in previous studies, there is no report about the comparison of transcription regulation in different organizations of breast cancer.

In precious study, HUANG’s research group has developed a new method for the meta-analysis of gene expression data. They used this method to compare the difference of learning and memorial function between Alzheimer disease and schizophrenia (Li WX et al. J Alzheimers Dis. 2016) and do the research about the gender heterogeneity of anti-stroke target（Li WX et al. PeerJ. 2016）. Recently, the research group integrated 14 gene expression datasets of breast cancer which included mammary gland, blood and saliva in the same way. The researchers constructed the specific TRNS of breast cancerous tissues through the above gene expression data and human transcription factor datasets. They found that there were significant differences of transcription regulation relationships between different organizations in breast cancer.

Time: 2017-01-06

Source: Kunming Institute of Zoology