Malignant phyllodes tumors of the breast are aggressive, occurring less frequently than fibroadenomas. The diagnosis is established after excluding metaplastic carcinoma and sarcomas. A 47 year old woman presented a primary tumor composed of hyperplastic epithelial and mucoid component, typically seen in fibroadenomas. Further investigations revealed PanCK, EMA and CK8/18 stained epithelial cel...

BACKGROUND Maspin is a unique member of the serine protease inhibitor superfamily and its expression is found in myoepithelial cells of normal mammary glands; therefore, it has been considered to be a myoepithelial marker. We previously reported that maspin was frequently expressed in biologically aggressive breast cancers. In turn, triple-negative (TN) breast cancer is a subtype of tumor with ...

Myoepithelial carcinoma (malignant myoepithelioma) of the breast is a rare tumor, for which only a limited number of reports have been published. Most of the reports emphasized diagnosis and pathology but not biological behavior and treatment. We report a 61-year-old patient with breast myoepithelial carcinoma who developed locoregional and distant metastases and received many chemotherapy regi...

Analogous to adenomyoepitheliomas of the breast, cutaneous adenomyoepithelioma is composed of two components, one being myoepithelial, the other ductal epithelial, and it lies in the spectrum of neoplasms having a "pure" myoepithelioma at one end and a mixed apocrine tumor at the other. We present the case of a 53-year-old woman with a 3 cm nodular lesion on her left forearm that had been prese...

BACKGROUND: Malignant myoepitheliomas of the breast are extremely rare. There has been a limited number of published reports of myoepithelial carcinomas originating from the breast. CASE REPORT: We describe a malignant myoepithelioma of the breast in a 56-year-old woman. Histological examination showed polygonal epithelioid cells and spindle cells with moderate to marked nuclear atypia. Immuno...

The normal duct-lobular system of the breast is lined by two epithelial cell types, inner luminal secretory cells and outer contractile myoepithelial cells. We have generated comprehensive expression profiles of the two normal cell types, using immunomagnetic cell separation and gene expression microarray analysis. The cell-type specificity was confirmed at the protein level by immunohistochemi...

In addition to contraction, myoepithelia have diverse paracrine effects, including a tumor suppression effect. However, certain myoepithelial markers have been shown to contribute to tumor progression. Transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) is involved in the transdifferentiation of fibroblasts to contractile myofibroblasts. We investigated whether TGF-β can upregulate potential myoepithelial mar...

that metastasis often occurs early in tumor progression. In early stage breast cancer, for example, a significant percentage of patients exhibit circulating tumor cells (CTC's) and disseminated bone marrow tumor cells (DTC's) [1,2]. More direct experimental evidence for " early metastasis " has been observed in studies of transgenic mice expressing a cancer-causing oncogene where the primary ca...

Epithelial-myoepithelial carcinoma was first described by Danath et al. in 1972 and is classified as a rare low-grade biphasic neoplasm of the salivary glands. This case report presents a male patient who had a lesion in the oral mucosa with a history of recurrence of the tumor. The outcome resulted in a profile consistent with an epithelial-myoepithelial carcinoma with a high degree of transfo...

The pleomorphic adenoma is the most common salivary gland tumor. A remarkable morphological diversity can exist from one tumor to the next. We present here a case of pleomorphic adenoma of minor salivary glands of the soft palate which had predominantly myoepithelial cells with minimal stroma, ductal cells, or tubular elements.