Carboxyl - terminal modulator protein positively regulates Akt phosphorylation and plays an oncogenic role in breast cancer

Supplementary Materials and Methods Tissue microarrays In this study, two different sets of tissue microarrays were used. One set was the screening tissue microarray, TA30-A, which was used to evaluate CTMP expression in different cancers. TA30-A contains a total of 146 normal and tumor punches representing colon, breast, gastric, and liver cancer and lung adenocarcinoma. The other set was the validating breast cancer tissue microarray, TMA-BC, from 204 breast cancer patients diagnosed between 1995 and 2011. TMA-BC was created from Kaohsiung Veterans General Hospital archives with IRB approval (VGHKS12-CT9-057). For each patient, two representative tumor tissue punches and one normal tissue punch were obtained from the resected tumor. Out of 204 patients, 198 had a recorded value for overall or disease-free survival and a preserved tissue punch after immunohistochemistry staining. Patient follow-up was performed for up to 215 months. A rabbit anti-CTMP antibody was used to label the tissue array at a concentration of 1:50 for immunohistochemistry. CTMP staining intensity was subjectively scored from 0 (no expression) to 3 (maximum expression) for each punch by two independent observers blinded to clinical outcomes. Survival curves were generated using the log-rank Kaplan-Meier method.