• Cancer

    New Type Of Molecular Mutation In Breast Cancer

A new class of molecular mutation, in various forms of breast cancer, has been discovered by Mayo Clinic researchers in Florida.   This finding may shed new light on the growth of different types of breast tumors and investigators believe the discovery could lead to the development of new drugs.

Called fusion transcripts, the mutated forms of RNA may also provide a way to identify tumor subtypes and offer new strategies to treat them.   Senior investigator Edith Perez, M.D.  says, “One of the challenges of treating the disease is to identify gene markers that predict how a tumor will respond to a specific treatment.”

Soundites from Dr. Perez are available in the downloads above.

Broadcast cg title: Dr. Edith Perez, Mayo Clinic Oncologist

Dr. Perez is deputy director of the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center  in Florida and director of the Breast Cancer Translational Genomics Program, which involves researchers at all three Mayo Clinic campuses.  The study is published in the April 15 issue of Cancer Research, and is the first to systematically search for fusion genes and fusion transcripts linked to different types of breast tumors. 

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