Clinical & experimental metastasis
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Clin. Exp. Metastasis · Jan 2006
Multicenter Study Controlled Clinical TrialDetection of Survivin-expressing circulating cancer cells in the peripheral blood of breast cancer patients by a RT-PCR ELISA.
Survivin mRNA expression was detected in 69.2%-93.8% of primary breast carcinomas, but is rarely expressed in normal breast tissues and hematopoietic cells. The objective of this study was to investigate the significance that the detection of Survinin-expressing circulating breast cancer cells in the peripheral blood has on clinical outcomes. The detection method was based on a RT-PCR ELISA technique developed in our laboratory. ⋯ The presence of Survivin-expressing circulating breast cancer cells was found to be significantly associated with various clinicopathological parameters such as vessel infiltration, histological grade, tumor size, nodal status, ER/PgR status, Her-2 status and clinical stages of the disease (P < 0.01). During a follow-up period of 36 months, 9 out of 11 (81.8%) breast cancer patients that had a positive Survivin-expressing at the time of the initial assay test suffered a relapse of the disease, whereas recurrence was only found in 2 out of 6 (33.3%) breast cancer patients that had a negative Survivin-expression. Thus, the detection of circulating cancer cells expressing Survivin mRNA could provide valuable information for the prediction of metastasis and recurrence of breast cancer.