BACKGROUND Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are associated with prognosis in a variety of human cancers and have been proposed as a liquid biopsy for follow-up examinations. We show that tumor suppressor and metastasis suppressor genes are epigenetically silenced in CTCs isolated from peripheral blood of breast cancer patients. METHODS We obtained peripheral blood from 56 patients with operable...

Objective(s): The growing trend of research demonstrates that dynamic expression of two metastasis repressor classes (metastasis suppressor genes and anti-metastatic miRNA) has a close relationship with tumor invasion and metastasis. Using different strategies, it was revealed that cellular levels of miR-31 and Breast cancer Metastasis Suppressor1 (BRMS1) protein, whic...

Lymph node metastases and tumor characteristics predict breast cancer prognosis but correlate imperfectly with likelihood of metastatic relapse. Discovery of genetic polymorphisms affecting metastasis may improve identification of patients requiring aggressive adjuvant therapy to prevent recurrence. We investigated associations between several variants in the BRMS1 and SIPA1 metastasis-modifyin...

Tumor metastasis is one of the most important clinical aspects of neoplastic disease because patient mortality is frequently attributable to disseminated rather than primary tumors. However, it still is not possible to definitively distinguish those individuals at high risk for disseminated disease, who would benefit from aggressive adjuvant therapy, from the low-risk patients who might be spar...

BRMS1 is a functioning gene comprising 10 exons and spanning 7.8 kb of genomic DNA. Alternative splicing results in two mRNA transcripts, translating into two distinct proteins, 246 amino acids and 290 amino acids in length, respectively (Seraj et al., 2000). The longer transcript uses an alternative splice site in the 3' untranslated terminal exon which results in the use of a downstream stop ...

Tumor metastasis is one of the most important clinical aspects of neoplastic disease because patient mortality is frequently attributable to disseminated rather than primary tumors. However, it still is not possible to definitively distinguish those individuals at high risk for disseminated disease, who would benefit from aggressive adjuvant therapy, from the low-risk patients who might be spar...

Metastasis is the leading cause of death in breast cancer (BC) patients. However, until now, the mechanisms of BC metastasis remain elusive. Cullin3 is a highly conserved Cullin family member present in the genomes of all eukaryotes, which has been proposed as an oncogene in many types of tumors; however, its role and underlying mechanisms in BC remain unclear. Here we show that Cullin3 is elev...