With Rigel not joining the bull party, I revisited a couple of issues. This one is interesting for a couple of reasons. For one, it's not even slightly new. This same group of authors published a similar paper in 2000. Different groups seem to come up with different results. Check this one out from 2005 (hint: ANCT stands for adjacent non-cancerous tissue):
>>J Carcinog 2005, 4:7
SYK expression in human breast cancer
AE Elkak, W AL Sarakbi, K Mokbel
The Breast Unit, St George's Hospital and Medical School, Blackshaw Road London, SW17 0QT, United Kingdom
Date of Submission 18-Mar-2005
Date of Acceptance 20-Apr-2005
Date of Web Publication 20-Apr-2005
Correspondence Address:
K Mokbel
The Breast Unit, St George's Hospital and Medical School, Blackshaw Road London, SW17 0QT
United Kingdom
© 2005 Elkak et al; This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
DOI: 10.1186/1477-3163-4-7
PMID: 15842733
Abstract
Background: Syk (Splenic Tyrosine Kinase) is an intracellular receptor protein kinase involved in cell proliferation, differentiation and phagocytosis. It has been studied in T and B lymphocytes, NK cells and platelets. The strong expression of Syk in mammary gland prompted research into its potential role in mammary carcinogenesis. There have been very few studies about its role in breast cancer with conflicting results. This study aims to investigate the hypothesis that Syk expression is down-regulated in breast cancer compared with ANCT and the association between its expression and clinicopathological parameters.
Materials and methods: mRNA was extracted from 48 breast cancer specimens. Relative Syk to ribosomal RNA expression was determined by RT-PCR and Taqman methodology. Mann-Whitney U test was used to examine the association between Syk expression in cancer and ANCT. Spearman's rank correlation test was used to examine the association between Syk expression in tumours and patients' age, tumour size, tumour grade, estrogen and progesterone receptor status, lymph node metastasis, vascular invasion and clinical outcome.
Results: The median for the relative value of Syk expression was 0.17 and 0.18 (range: 0.12 - 0.56 and 0.0 - 1.77) for tumours and ANCT respectively. There was no significant association between Syk expression in cancers and ANCT (p= 0.598) nor between Syk expression in tumours and patients' age, tumour size, tumour grade, estrogen and progesterone receptor status, lymph node metastasis, vascular invasion or prognosis.
Conclusion: This study shows that Syk mRNA expression does not seem to vary between breast tumours and ANCT. Furthermore, we observed no significant association between Syk expression and clinicopathological parameters.<<
carcinogenesis.com
Contains the full article. This references the 2000 Coopman, Mueller, et. al. article, as well as a couple that seem to contradict it.
So several dueling studies, and fostamatinib is still being studied in oncology. Though not in breast cancer.
Cheers, Tuck |
