Improving breast cancer prognoses

SAN DIEGO, Oct. 17 (UPI) -- Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, are working to predict the likelihood that breast cancer will spread to other parts of the body.

Bioengineering professor Trey Ideker and colleagues at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology took advantage of new protein interaction databases and identified networks of genes from breast cancer patients -- rather than individual genes -- that can be used to predict whether a breast cancer tumor is likely to spread.

The findings, published in the journal Molecular Systems Biology, offer new mechanistic insights into breast cancer metastasis -- and who will respond to chemotherapy.

"Over the years, large numbers of women have endured unnecessarily harsh treatments, such as aggressive chemotherapy, due to our inability to predict metastasis risks with high accuracy," Ideker said in a statement. "One of our goals is to improve this situation."