title: Approaches towards expression profiling the response to treatment.
abstract: Over the past 8 years there has been a wealth of breast cancer gene expression studies. The majority of these studies have focused upon characterising a tumour at presentation, before treatment, rather than looking at the effects of treatment on the tumour. More recently, a number of groups have moved from predicting prognosis based upon long-term follow-up to alternative approaches of using expression profiling to measure the effect of treatment on breast tumours and potentially predict response to therapy using either post-treatment samples or both pre-treatment and post-treatment samples. Whilst this provides great potential to further our understanding of the mode of action of treatments and to more accurately select which patients will benefit from a particular treatment, serious issues of experimental design must be considered.
authors.forename: Andrew H
authors.initials: AH
authors.lastname: Sims
authors.forename: John M S
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Bartlett
mesh_terms: D001943:Breast Neoplasms / Q000188:drug therapy* / Q000235:genetics* / Q000473:pathology; D005260:Female; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling; D006801:Humans; D011379:Prognosis; D016896:Treatment Outcome