Brit J cancer: finding new genes for breast cancer

March 16, 2019 / BIOON / - scientists from Australia and the United States have developed a method to find out the hidden oncogene, and have found a gene that may promote malignant breast cancer A team from the University of Queensland (UQ) and the Einstein School of medicine developed a statistical tool (oncomix) to find previously elusive oncogenes Photo source: Jess Mar, assistant professor at the British Journal of cancer UQ Australian Institute of bioengineering and nanotechnology, said that most of the oncogenes found today are found in patients with specific types of cancer "When you synthesize data from these patients, these genes seem to have a significant impact, but they're not all the culprits." Professor Mar said "Even a group of patients with the same kind or subtype have different cancer molecular composition, because the gene activity of each patient is different If a oncogene is active in one group of patients, but inactive in another group of patients, it is difficult to see the difference from the previous statistical data If you only look at the average data of two groups of patients, it's hard to find the high activity of this gene in the first group of patients " Their new oncomix approach allows researchers to drill down into the genetic information of cancer patients to find distinct genes in two sets of patient data "We recognize that there is diversity among cancer patients, but we are still looking for demographic trends." Dr mar and his colleagues used oncomix to test the data of breast cancer patients in the cancer genome database They found five overactive genes in a group of patients and found the most promising target cbx2 "Previous studies have shown that cbx2 activity is low in most healthy women's tissues, while cbx2 activity is high in one breast cancer cell This suggests that there may be a link between cbx2 activity and breast cancer, but no previous study has focused on the specific link So we turned off this gene in the human breast cancer cell line and found that it could slow down the growth of breast cancer cells, suggesting that cbx2 might promote tumor growth " Mar said that if future tests confirm that cbx2 is a oncogene, it will become a potential therapeutic target for this type of breast cancer "This finding highlights the value of the oncomix approach Finding out the hidden patient-specific oncogenes will provide direction for the development of new therapies, and will also bring us closer to personalized medicine " Oncomix is now an open source software tool, and the research is published in British Journal of cancer Reference: Daniel g piqu é et al A new approach to modeling transcription ergonomic identities the oncogene candidate cbx2 in invasive breast cancer, British Journal of cancer (2019) Doi: 10.1038/s41416-019-0387-8