Deep Sequencing of the Breast Cancer Transcriptome

This project is a pilot study designed to investigate transcriptional regulation in breast cancer. Although the main focus of the present study will be triple negative breast cancer where all of the clinically relevant receptors - estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR) and herceptin (HER2) - are absent, all breast tissue biospecimens, including normal and mammary dysplasia, stored in the UAMS Tissue bank, procured from outside collaborators or purchased from commercial vendors will eventually be investigated. We will use high throughput molecular profiling techniques such as microarrays and next generation sequencing to correlate gene expression and gene expression regulation with clinical parameters such as tumor size, time to relapse and overall survival.