Prognostic significance of the c-erbB-2 oncogene product in childhood medulloblastoma

Abstract

Newcastle Lpon Ty ne, U'K.Summaeo The expression and prognostic significance of the c-erbB-2 oncogene product was studied in 55 cases of childhood medulloblastoma. Forty-six of the 55 tumours (83.6%) expressed the c-erbB-2 product. The percentage of tumour cells expressing the c-erbB-2 product proved to be a significant indicator of patient outcome when analysed as both a categorical and a continuous vanrable. As a categorical variable, patients with more than 50% positive tumour cells had a significantly worse survival, with only 10% alive at 10 years Vs 48% for those with less than 50% positive tumour cells (log rank P = 0.0049). To demonstrate that this observed prognostic significance was both independent and not a result of 'data-driven' categorisation. it was also entered into the Cox model as a continuous variable. Prognostic significance was retained with P= 0.038-

Comparative genomic hybridization and histological variation in primitive neuroectodermal tumours

“…The epidermal growth factor receptor pathway substrate 8 (Eps8) gene maps to this region and overexpression of its product Eps8 enhances mitogenic response to epidermal growth factor (Fazioli et al, 1993;Wong et al, 1994). A role for Eps8 in tumour development or progression in these cases of PNET might therefore be postulated, particularly in view of recent attention given to the potential prognostic implications of EGFR expression (Gilbertson et al, 1997). Gain of 12q24 in our series was also associated with classic histology and absence of GFAP immunoreactivity.…”

Inefficient proteasomal‐degradation pathway stabilizes AP‐2α and activates HER‐2/neu gene in breast cancer

“…Using immunohistochemical studies, one group observed strong nuclear expression of AP-2a in HER-2/neu positive childhood medulloblastomas. 62 But in similar studies, another group found no correlation or even a negative relationship between the two in human breast tumor specimens. 63 In immunohistochemical studies using a large number of patient samples, Pellikainen et al 14 observed that the HER-2 2 /AP-2 1 patients had the best prognosis for recurrence-free survival while the worst prognosis was seen with HER-2 1 /AP-2 2 patients.…”

Suppression of breast cancer cell growth by a monoclonal antibody targeting cleavable ErbB4 isoforms

“…Some observations indicate that ErbB4 receptor is downregulated in various cancers, or that its expression is associated with favorable prognostic markers, such as estrogen receptor expression (Srinivasan et al, 1998;Witton et al, 2003). On the other hand, ErbB4 has been reported to be expressed in high levels in several cancers such as thyroid (Haugen et al, 1996), ovarian (Furger et al, 1998) and breast cancer (Srinivasan et al, 1999), as well as medulloblastoma (Gilbertson et al, 1997), and ependymoma (Gilbertson et al, 2002). Furthermore, the significance of ErbB4 expression levels for clinical outcome is conflicting (Sundvall et al, 2008a).…”