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Updated: Feb 1, 2026

Studying Triple Negative Breast Cancer Using Orthotopic Breast Cancer Model
Published on: March 20, 2020
Potential protein markers for breast cancer recurrence: a retrospective cohort study
Chunyan He1,2, Rina Plattner3,4,5, Vivek Rangnekar3,6
1Markey Cancer Center, University of Kentucky, 744 Rose Street, Combs 206, Lexington, KY, 40536, USA. chunyan.he@uky.edu.
Background:
We evaluated five key proteins involved in various cancer-related pathways and assessed their relation to breast cancer recurrence.
Methods:
We used the Kentucky Cancer Registry to retrospectively identify primary invasive breast cancer cases (n = 475) that were diagnosed and treated at University of Kentucky Medical Center between 2000 and 2007. Breast cancer recurrence was observed in 62 cases during the 5-year follow-up after diagnosis. Protein expression or activity level was analyzed from surgery tissue using immuno-histochemical assays.
Results:
Compared to ER+/PR+/HER2- patients without recurrence, those with recurrence had higher TWIST expression (p = 0.049) but lower ABL1/ABL2 activity (p = 0.003) in primary tumors. We also found that triple-negative breast cancer patients with recurrence had higher SNAI1 expression compared to those without recurrence (p = 0.03). After adjusting for potential confounders, the higher ABL1/ABL2 activity in primary tumors was associated with a decreased risk of recurrence (OR 0.72, 95% CI 0.85-0.90) among ER+/PR+/HER2- patients. In addition, among patients with recurrence we observed that the activity level of ABL1/ABL2 was significantly increased in recurrent tumors compared to the matched primary tumors regardless of the subtype (p = 0.013).
Conclusions:
These findings provide evidence that the expression/activity level of various proteins may be differentially associated with risk of recurrence of breast tumor subtypes.
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