Mammaglobin And The Detection Of Breast Cancer Micrometastasis

Purpose: Circulating cancer cells in the blood play a central role in the metastastic process. The mammaglobin gene (hMAM) is expressed exclusively in the mammary glands of adult woman and in breast cancer. We examined hMAM mRNA expression as a marker for the detection of carcinoma cells by reverse transcriptase chain reaction (RT-PCR) in the peripheral blood of patients with breast cancer (BC).Methods: Total RNA, which was extracted from a breast carcinoma cell line (SKBR3), 44 primary breast carcinomas and normal breast tissue, 5 breast hyperplasia, 3 breast adenoma and 25 other carcinomas (including gastric carcinoma, esophageal carcinoma, lung carcinoma, ovary carcinoma and carcinoma of the large intestine) was subjected to analysis of hMAM mRNA expression by the RT-PCR. A serial dilution of SKBR3 cell in 10~7 WBCs was used to determined the sensitivity of the nest PCR combined with FQ-PCR. Peripheral blood of 63 breast cancer, 8 breast hyperplasia, 5 breast adenofibroma, 25 other carcinoma and 31 healthy volunteers was examined by the same method. The relationships between clinicopathological characteristics of the patients and the results of RT-PCR was analyzed by statistics.Results: hMAM mRNA was detected by RT-PCR in SKBR3 cells and in all 44 breast carcinomas but not in patients with other cancers. In the analysis, hMAM mRNA levels were increased relative to normal breast tissue in 56.8% of cases. A serial dilution study revealed that hMAM nest PCR combined with FQ-PCR was a very sensitive method, detecting one SKBR3 cell per 10~6 to 10~7 WBCs. Among the...