Log on / register
BioMed Central home | Journals A-Z | Feedback | Support | My details
Editorial

Approaches towards expression profiling the response to treatment

Andrew H Sims1 email and John MS Bartlett2 email

Applied Bioinformatics of Cancer Group, University of Edinburgh Cancer Research Centre, Western General Hospital, Edinburgh EH4 2XR, UK

Endocrine Cancer Group, University of Edinburgh Cancer Research Centre, Western General Hospital, Edinburgh EH4 2XR, UK

author email corresponding author email

Breast Cancer Research 2008, 10:115doi:10.1186/bcr2196

Published: 8 December 2008


See related research article by Vendrell et al., http://breast-cancer-research.com/content/10/5/R88

Abstract

Over the past 8 years there has been a wealth of breast cancer gene expression studies. The majority of these studies have focused upon characterising a tumour at presentation, before treatment, rather than looking at the effects of treatment on the tumour. More recently, a number of groups have moved from predicting prognosis based upon long-term follow-up to alternative approaches of using expression profiling to measure the effect of treatment on breast tumours and potentially predict response to therapy using either post-treatment samples or both pre-treatment and post-treatment samples. Whilst this provides great potential to further our understanding of the mode of action of treatments and to more accurately select which patients will benefit from a particular treatment, serious issues of experimental design must be considered.


© 1999-2010 BioMed Central Ltd unless otherwise stated. Part of Springer Science+Business Media.