October 1, 2015

expert reaction to study on genetic alterations in healthy breast tissue cells and non-familial breast cancer risk

Publishing in the journal Genome Research, a group of scientists have described their work analysing genetic abnormalities in cells from breast tumours compared to normal cells, and report that changes in certain genes might be used as a predictor of sporadic breast cancer.

Prof. Paul Pharoah, Professor of Cancer Epidemiology, University of Cambridge, said:

“This is an interesting paper from a scientific/biological point of view but I think it is a very long way from being clinically interesting. In brief, this group has shown that they can find abnormalities in the genome of normal breast tissue adjacent to breast cancer tissue and that some of these abnormalities are similar to the abnormalities found in the genome of the cancers themselves. However, this does not mean that the presence of such abnormalities in women without breast cancer would be associated with an increased risk of developing cancer (as implied in the paper). Furthermore, even if it could be established that they were associated with risk it is hard to see how this would be clinically useful as one would need to get a biopsy of a healthy woman’s normal breast tissue to analyse in order to identify those at high risk.”

‘Signatures of post-zygotic structural genetic aberrations in the cells of histologically normal breast tissue that can predispose to sporadic breast cancer’ by Forsberg  et al. published in Genome Research on Thursday 1^st October. 

Declared interests

Prof. Paul Pharoah: I have no conflicts of interest.