17 double heterozygous (DH) breast cancer (BC) patients were identified upon the analysis of 5,391 affected women for recurrent Slavic mutations in BRCA1, CHEK2, NBN/NBS1, ATM, and BLM genes.
Checkpoint Kinase 2 (CHEK2) is an important signal transducer of cellular responses to DNA damage, whose defects have been associated with an increase in breast cancer risk.
CHK2 (checkpoint kinase 2) and BRCA1 (breast cancer early-onset 1) are tumour-suppressor genes that have been implicated previously in the DNA damage response.
A 1100delC mutation in CHEK2 (previously known as CHK2), a cell-cycle checkpoint kinase, has been implicated in predisposition of Li-Fraumeni syndrome (LFS) and breast cancer in families suggestive of LFS.
A novel recurrent CHEK2Y390C mutation identified in high-risk Chinese breast cancer patients impairs its activity and is associated with increased breast cancer risk.
A truncating allele of the cell cycle checkpoint kinase CHK2 is present in 1% of the population, conferring a moderate increase in breast cancer risk, and inactivation of chk2 enhances mammary tumorigenesis in mice with targeted inactivation of brca1.
Accordingly, in this study many pyrimidine-benzimidazole conjugates were designed and twelve feasible derivatives were selected to be synthesized to investigate their activity against Chk2 and subjected to study their antitumor activity alone and in combination with the genotoxic anticancer drugs cisplatin and doxorubicin on breast carcinoma, (ER+) cell line (MCF-7).
After exclusion of BRCA1, BRCA2, and syndromic breast cancer genes (CDH1, PTEN, and TP53), observed pathogenic variants in 5 of 16 genes were associated with high or moderately increased risks of breast cancer: ATM (OR, 2.78; 95% CI, 2.22-3.62), BARD1 (OR, 2.16; 95% CI, 1.31-3.63), CHEK2 (OR, 1.48; 95% CI, 1.31-1.67), PALB2 (OR, 7.46; 95% CI, 5.12-11.19), and RAD51D (OR, 3.07; 95% CI, 1.21-7.88).
Another recurrent mutation with attenuated in vitro function, CHEK2-P85L, is not associated with increased breast cancer susceptibility, but exhibits a striking difference in frequency across populations with different ancestral histories.