Thioredoxin and related redox systems as targets in breast cancer

Excerpt

Redox systems are often deregulated in cancer. To investigate whether altered expression predicted response to therapy, core biopsies from 80 locally advanced breast tumours (pre-six cycles of fluorouracil epidoxorubicin cyclophosphamide/fluorouracil adriamycin cyclophosphamide chemotherapy) were stained, using standard immunohistochemistry, to examine members of the Trx system (Trx1, TrxR and TxNIP), GST-π, GST-θ, catalase and MnSOD, and results were correlated with clinicopathological criteria. Significant results were obtained between TxNIP and progression-free survival (P = 0.008) and overall survival (P = 0.05), with low expression predicting a worse prognosis. A redox protein profile was developed, using an artificial neural network approach, with four of the proteins (catalase, GST-θ, GST-π and TxNIP), that stratifies patients into good/poor prognostic groups for overall survival with an 88% sensitivity and 87% specificity. …