We previously cloned and characterised alternatively spliced variants of ADAM15 that differ in their intracellular domains and demonstrated correlation of the expression of specific variants with breast cancer prognosis.
These findings provide insights into the mechanism of how a splice variant linked to clinical agressiveness in breast cancer causes increased activity of ADAM15B, and suggest that inhibitors of the ADAM15 protease activity or of the interaction of ADAM15B with Src could be useful to treat breast cancer in patients with dysregulated ADAM15B.
These data indicate that selective expression of ADAM-15 variants in breast cancers could play an important role in determining tumor aggressiveness by interplay with intracellular signaling pathways.
ADAM15 would be particularly appropriate for breast cancer diagnostics because the various combinations of its three alternatively used exons can be readily examined with a simple, straightforward PCR protocol.