Protein expression of Distal-less homeobox 4 (DLX4) was analyzed in inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) cases from an African-American (AA) population to determine if a) DLX4 gene over expression exists in this cohort and b) if the overexpression is associated with breast cancer clinicopathological characteristics (ER, PR, HER2, triple-negative).
Overall, BP1 overexpresssion in MCF-7 breast cancer cells leads to increased cell growth, estrogen-independent tumor formation, and increased proliferation.
Recent reports have suggested that abnormal expression of DLX4 is present in several types of human tumors, including breast cancer, leukemia and colon cancer.
Additional studies evaluating DLX4 copy number in non-SLN axillary lymph nodes and/or distant breast cancer metastasis are necessary to determine if these alterations are carried on and maintained during more advanced stages of tumor progression and if could be used as a predictive marker for axillary involvement.
Analysis of breast cancer datasets revealed that TOP2A-high cases that also highly expressed DLX4 responded more poorly to anthracycline-based chemotherapy than TOP2A-high cases that expressed DLX4 at low levels.
Our studies have shown that the BP1 gene was overexpressed in 81% of primary breast cancer and its expression was closely correlated with the progression of breast cancer.
Taken together, our results support the notion that BP1 might contribute to breast neoplastic transformation or tumor progression and suggest for the first time that BP1 mRNA level has potential as a prognostic predictor for breast cancer.
Therefore our aim in this study is to assess the amplification status of the BP1 gene in breast cancer and to determine whether BP1 protein expression is caused by gene amplification in these tumors.