Breast Cancer Detection by PCR Based DNA Fingerprinting

Dysfunctional genes and aberrant expression of regulatory genes are speculated to be key eventsin human tumorigenesis. In breast cancer, examples of these genes include, but are not limited toc-erbB-2 (HER-2/neu), int-2, and c-myc, (oncogenes), and p53 (tumor suppressor gene). Many otherundefined oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes may also play a role in breast cancer development.We propose to detect somatic genetic alterations in breast cancer and breast metastases through thetechnique of PCR-based DNA fingerprinting. In this procedure, a single primer with an arbitrarilydetermined sequence is used to produce "fingerprints" of DNAs from normal and breast tumor andmetastases from the same donor. Since DNA sequences are often lost and/or amplified in tumor cells,the fingerprints of breast tumors and metastases should have different band(s) when compared to thefingerprints of the corresponding normal tissue of the same individual. Somatic genetic alterations suchas losses of heterozygosity and chromosomal gains, two alterations frequently involved in thedevelopment of aneuploidy of cancer cells, can be detected by this very powerful technique.