Investigation of c-Myc gene amplification in breast cancer patients and its correlation with other prognostic factors

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in woman. The frequency of amplification of some proto-oncogenes like c-Myc gene may be various in different populations. In this study, amplification of c-Myc oncogene was determined in breast cancer patients and its correlation with prognostic factors such as age, tumor size, tumor stage, grade of the disease, lymph node involvement, HER/2 protein expression, estrogen and progesterone receptors and recurrence was also investigated.
In this study, to determine the amplification of c-Myc oncogenes in breast cancer patients, the multiplex PCR technique was used. After extracting DNA from 100 tumor tissue and 8 normal breast tissue samples, amplification of c-Myc gene was determined by coamplification of a single-copy reference gene, g-IFN, and the target gene c-myc in PCR reaction and using the Gel analyzer software. In the next step, the correlation of the amplification of this gene with other prognostic factors was investigated.
In this study, amplification of the c-Myc gene was observed in 27% of the tumor samples. The statistic analysis showed that amplification of the c-Myc oncogene was significantly associated with the recurrence of breast cancer. There was no significant correlation between amplification of the c-Myc oncogene and other prognostic factors including age, estrogen and progesterone receptors, lymph node involvement, HER/2 expression, tumor size, stage and grade of the disease.
Amplification of the c-Myc gene can be used as an independent prognostic factor in predicting the recurrence in breast cancer patients.