Recently, HOXB13 has been established as a prostate cancer susceptibility gene in North America, with a relative risk associated with a single missense mutation of about 20. Ewing et al., sequenced over 200 genes in a prostate cancer linkage region at 17q21-22 among 94 probands of prostate cancer families, and found a recurrent mutation in the HOXB13 gene (G84E) in four families. The mutation c...

The recent and exciting discovery of germline HOXB13 mutations in familial prostate cancer has brought HOX signaling to the forefront of prostate cancer research. An enhanced understanding of HOX signaling, and the co-factors regulating HOX protein specificity and transcriptional regulation, has the high potential to elucidate novel approaches to prevent, diagnose, stage, and treat prostate can...

HOX genes encode transcription factors that function to establish basic body pattern during embryogenesis and maintain the function of specific organs in the adult. Recent studies have demonstrated that HOX genes are also involved in oncogenesis in a range of malignancies. To elucidate whether HOX genes contribute to ovarian carcinogenesis, we created an expression profile of HOX genes using ov...

Data from microarray studies have been used to develop predictive models for treatment outcome in breast cancer, such as a recently proposed predictive model for antiestrogen response after tamoxifen treatment that was based on the expression ratio of two genes. We attempted to validate this model on an independent cohort of 58 patients with resectable estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer. ...

The HOXB13 missense mutation G84E (rs138213197) is associated with increased risk of prostate cancer, but the current estimate of increased risk has a wide confidence interval (width of 95% confidence interval (CI) >200-fold) so the point estimate of 20-fold increased risk could be misleading. Population-based family studies can be more informative for estimating risks for rare variants, theref...