On June 14, at the annual meeting of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB)/8th International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Conference (IUBMB) in Boston, Dr. Perou said clinicians have recognized for some time that there were two types of estrogen receptor negative tumors, those with receptors for the HER2 protein and those without it. "But, it was like looking at a building from the outside," he said. "Identifying the patterns of literally hundreds of genes and the proteins they represent lets us walk inside the building and see what's there - and exactly where we could intervene with a treatment."
Dr. Perou's lab is known for its use of genomic approaches to classify human tumors and to understand pathways altered within each tumor subtype. He then works to implement these findings into standard clinical practice. In earlier work reported in 2000, Dr. Perou and colleagues also discovered a previously unsuspected biologically distinct subtype of estrogen positive breast tumor with a very poor outcome, work that does much to explain why a small percentage of estrogen positive tumors do not have a good outcome.
Dr. Perou says the ability to classify tumors into subtypes is made possible by microarray analysis, a technique that allows scientists to examine vast numbers of genes simultaneously. "The power of genomics is that we no longer are limited to looking at the impact of a single gene," says Dr. Perou. "The biomarker for these subtypes is actually a pattern in which hundreds of genes are interacting. Without these biomarkers, the differences between these tumors would not be recognized and therapies could not be matched appropriately."
Dr. Perou is a member of the Genetics and Pathology faculty at the University of North Carolina. Funding for this work came from the National Cancer Institute, NCI SPORE project, and Breast Cancer Research Foundation.
With more than 11,900 members, the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology is a nonprofit scientific and education organization dedicated to promoting understanding of the molecular nature of life processes.