Oncotarget: Heterogeneity of CEACAM5 in breast cancer

Oncotarget recently published "Heterogeneity of CEACAM5 in breast cancer" which reported that Here, we examined a repository of 110 cryopreserved primary breast carcinomas by immunohistochemistry to assess the distribution of CEACAM5 in tumor subtypes.

Assessing sample sets of paired primary breast cancers and corresponding lymph node lesions from a total of 59 patients revealed a high correlation between primary tumor and lymph node with regard to CEACAM5-status.

When examining the consequence of expression of CEACAM5 in breast cancer cell lines in culture assays we found that CEACAM5-expressing cells were less invasive.

In survival analysis, using cohort studies of breast cancer, the expression of CEACAM5 predicted different clinical outcomes depending on molecular subtypes.

Altogether, our analysis suggests that CEACAM5 plays a context-dependent role in breast cancer that warrants further investigation.

Dr. René Villadsen from The University of Copenhagen said, "The carcinoembryonic antigen family (CEA) consists of a subgroup of 12 members of carcinoembryonic antigen-related cell adhesion molecules (CEACAMs), and several of these are reportedly overexpressed in various cancers."

Early work suggested that CEACAM5 was also often overexpressed in breast cancer.

Figure 6: Proposed mechanisms of tumor dissemination from primary breast tumors to metastases. CEACAM5-expression outlined as no expression (white circle), heterogeneous expression (half-filled grey circle) and homogeneous expression (filled grey circle) based on the observed expression patterns in a total of 59 sets of primary breast carcinomas (P) and corresponding lymph node metastases (M), including datasets from both cryosectioned tissue and TMA. The distribution of the 59 tumor sets are outlined along with a representative immunostain at the right, as well as the proportion of tumor-sets with the given profile. Hierarchy-locked suggests that the disseminating tumor cells remain in a specific differentiation state. Induced suggests that extrinsic factors lead to induction of CEACAM5 in negative cells. EMT and EMT/MET suggest that disseminating tumor cells undergo epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) without or with subsequent mesenchymal to epithelial transition (MET), respectively. Hierarchy-based suggests that disseminating cancer stem cells retain their differentiation capacity.

Since then several immunobased assays have been implemented to examine the role of CEACAM5 as a clinically relevant marker in breast cancer.

While some studies have demonstrated that increased serum levels in preoperative breast cancer patients do correlate to a worse outcome others have Immunophenotypic.

A summary of the observed results are available in Table 1. Overall, the available data do not provide a consensus on the role of CEACAM5 in breast cancer.

Here, we assess CEACAM5 expression in breast cancer subtypes by immunohistochemistry, and compare the expression pattern in primary tumors to corresponding lymph node metastases.

The Villadsen Research Team concluded in their Oncotarget Research Paper, "the findings in this study may help improve the understanding of the biological effect of CEACAM5-expression in breast cancer."

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DOI - https://doi.org/10.18632/oncotarget.27778

Full text - https://www.oncotarget.com/article/27778/text/

Correspondence to - René Villadsen - r.villadsen@sund.ku.dk

Keywords - CEACAM5, CEA, immunohistochemistry, breast cancer, invasion

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