Breast Cancer Research

official impact factor 5.79

Editorial

Approaches towards expression profiling the response to treatment

Andrew H Sims1 and John MS Bartlett2*

Author Affiliations

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

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

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


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

Published: 8 December 2008

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.