Promoter methylation correlates with reduced SMAD4 expression in patients with breast cancer

Over the past decades, there is a dramatic rise in the mortality and incidence rates of breast cancer globally, despite the progressive advancement of therapeutic options. Late detection of breast cancer is often the main culprit for the ineffective treatment, and death in patients. Finding breast cancer biomarkers is thus of significant importance. Epigenetic modifications are associated with up and down regulation of important biomarker in the TGF-β pathway, such as SMAD4, which may have a greater impact in the growth and poor prognosis in breast cancer. In the current investigation we are going to check how SMAD4 regulate in various Breast cancer patients? And how its epigenetic modifications play crucial role in disease prognosis?

Twenty eight samples of patients with proven breast cancer and the adjacent normal tissue from the same patients were analyzed for SMAD4 expression using real-time PCR and Western blot. Additionally, MS-PCR was employed to detect the epigenetic and genetic alterations.

SMAD4 expression dropped from Grade 1 to Grade 3 breast cancer both at mRNA and protein level as justified by real time PCR as well as western blot. This down regulation of SMAD4 expression is due to its promoter methylation, which may be a major contributing reason to the dysregulated production of SMAD4 in instances of breast cancer.

According to these findings, SMAD4 status assessment in breast cancer, fine-needle biopsy specimens may offer further prognostic data. Worse prognosis was linked to reduced SMAD4 expression due to promoter methylation in Breast cancer.