Identification of New Prognostic Markers for Breast Cancer.
Identification of New Prognostic Markers for Breast Cancer.
Candidate markers have been identified thanks to an original approach developed by our
 research team aiming at detecting ectopic gene expression using public pan-genomic breast
 cancer data. The same approach had already been used and validated in lung tumors, leukemias
 and lymphomas. The main objective of the present research is to use tumor samples from
 patients in a retrospective and prospective cohort to test and validate the relevance of
 these prognostic markers in breast cancer.
Following a diagnosis of breast cancer, the most immediate challenges in patient management
 are the determination of prognosis and the identification of the most appropriate neoadjuvant
 and adjuvant systemic therapy. Indicators to assess the risk of relapse or metastasis during
 treatment are still largely insufficient, a situation which does not allow to precisely
 adjust the treatment, often leading to heavy side effects. In order to minimize the side
 effects and risks of therapies, it is therefore necessary to discover new markers which would
 enable us to reliably assess the prognosis of patients diagnosed with breast cancer.

 The approach used here for discovering new prognostic markers is based on an original
 strategy developed by the researchers associated with this project and published in the
 respective contexts of lung cancer, acute lymphoblastic leukemia and lymphoma. Indeed,
 genetic abnormalities and deregulation of the systems controlling the expression of specific
 gene programs not only lead to the abnormal extinction of normally active genes, but is also
 responsible for the aberrant activation of genes that normally should remain silent. The
 investigators have recently demonstrated that any type of malignancy is associated with the
 ectopic expression of these normally silent genes, including genes of the male germline. The
 in-depth study of these aberrant gene expressions and the search for correlations and
 associations with the clinical and biological data of the tumors show that the expression of
 some of these genes and the presence of their products are good indicators of tumor
 aggressiveness.

 The investigators propose here to apply the same approach for the search for new prognostic
 markers in the case of breast cancer. A prior analysis of breast tumors, of which
 transcriptome data are publicly available, has identified a number of tissue-specific genes,
 including the germline and placenta genes, frequently activated in breast cancer. Based on
 our past observations, our hypothesis is that some of them may directly reflect the level of
 tumor aggressiveness and could therefore be used as prognostic biomarkers.

 The objective of this work will be to look for the prognostic value of these genes by using
 the samples collected in this cohort of patients to detect their activation and to correlate
 these aberrant activations with the anatomopathological data of the tumor, as well as to the
 clinico-biological data and patient follow-up.
Inclusion Criteria:

 -  Adult female patients with breast cancer

 Exclusion Criteria:

 -  Presence of another cancer, excluding basal cell cancers or pre-neoplastic lesions of
 the cervix.

 -  Subject under guardianship or subject deprived of liberty

 -  Impossibility of collecting information on exposure (subjects recently arrived in
 France, foreign language, etc.)

 -  Male patients