FIRB-HRBC

Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer morbidity in women, accounting for close to one fourth of all new cancer cases in the female population; one out of ten women is likely to develop breast cancer in her lifetime. The project will focus on the definition of a set of genes involved in human breast cancer that will serve as a basis for the design of a common microarray platform. The platform will be used by all partners for carrying out gene expression profiling experiments. A common database will be implemented where all data gathered on each individual gene under study will be stored and made accessible to all participant laboratories. In addition, a separate database will link patient and gene expression data.

• to provide exploitable information on the molecular basis of estrogen actions in Breast Cancer cells and on the functions of the products encoded by the newly identified hormone-responsive genes and their biological roles in BC cells
• to investigate the possibility that some of such genes might represent novel and informative molecular markers for molecular and immuno phenotypic characterization of breast tumors
• the clinical partners will carry out morphological, cytogenetic, genomic and proteomic analysis of breast cancer biopsies, focusing mainly on the genes identified in the hormone-responsive cell lines and other model systems as transgenic mice
• to search for correlations between expression or mutations of these genes and the clinical outcome of the disease