Human Gene Set: BERTUCCI_MEDULLARY_VS_DUCTAL_BREAST_CANCER_UP


Standard name BERTUCCI_MEDULLARY_VS_DUCTAL_BREAST_CANCER_UP
Systematic name M14539
Brief description Genes up-regulated in medullary breast cancer (MBC) relative to ductal breast cancer (DBD).
Full description or abstract Medullary breast cancer (MBC) is a rare but enigmatic pathologic type of breast cancer. Despite features of aggressiveness, MBC is associated with a favorable prognosis. Morphologic diagnosis remains difficult in many cases. Very little is known about the molecular alterations involved in MBC. Notably, it is not clear whether MBC and ductal breast cancer (DBC) represent molecularly distinct entities and what genes/proteins might account for their differences. Using whole-genome oligonucleotide microarrays, we compared gene expression profiles of 22 MBCs and 44 grade III DBCs. We show that MBCs are less heterogeneous than DBCs. Whereas different molecular subtypes (luminal A, luminal B, basal, ERBB2-overexpressing, and normal-like) exist in DBCs, 95% MBCs display a basal profile, similar to that of basal DBCs. Supervised analysis identified gene expression signatures that discriminated MBCs from DBCs. Discriminator genes are associated with various cellular processes related to MBC features, in particular immune reaction and apoptosis. As compared with MBCs, basal DBCs overexpress genes involved in smooth muscle cell differentiation, suggesting that MBCs are a distinct subgroup of basal breast cancer with limited myoepithelial differentiation. Finally, MBCs overexpress a series of genes located on the 12p13 and 6p21 chromosomal regions known to contain pluripotency genes. Our results contribute to a better understanding of MBC and of mammary oncogenesis in general.
Collection C2: Curated
      CGP: Chemical and Genetic Perturbations
Source publication Pubmed 16651414   Authors: Bertucci F,Finetti P,Cervera N,Charafe-Jauffret E,Mamessier E,Adélaïde J,Debono S,Houvenaeghel G,Maraninchi D,Viens P,Charpin C,Jacquemier J,Birnbaum D
Exact source Table 3S
Related gene sets (show 1 additional gene sets from the source publication)

(show 20 gene sets from any of these authors)
External links
Filtered by similarity ?
Source species Homo sapiens
Contributed by Arthur Liberzon (MSigDB Team)
Source platform or
identifier namespace		 AFFY_HG_U133
Dataset references  
Download gene set format: grp | gmt | xml | json | TSV metadata
Compute overlaps ? (show collections to investigate for overlap with this gene set)
Compendia expression profiles ? NG-CHM interactive heatmaps
(Please note that clustering takes a few seconds)
GTEx compendium
Human tissue compendium (Novartis)
Global Cancer Map (Broad Institute)
NCI-60 cell lines (National Cancer Institute)

Legacy heatmaps (PNG)
GTEx compendium
Human tissue compendium (Novartis)
Global Cancer Map (Broad Institute)
NCI-60 cell lines (National Cancer Institute)
Advanced query Further investigate these 208 genes
Gene families ? Categorize these 208 genes by gene family
Show members (show 269 source identifiers mapped to 208 genes)
Version history 3.0: First introduced


Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY-4.0)

The contents of this gene set are protected by copyright (c) 2004-2026 Broad Institute, Inc., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Regents of the University of California, subject to the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

See the full MSigDB license terms here.