Investigation of c-Myc gene amplification in breast cancer patients and its correlation with other prognostic factors

Background: Breast cancer is the most common cancer in woman. The frequency of amplification of some proto-oncogenes like c-Myc gene may be various in different populations. In this study, amplification of c-Myc oncogene was determined in breast cancer patients and its correlation with prognostic factors such as age, tumor size, tumor stage, grade of the disease, lymph node involvement, HER/2 protein expression, estrogen and progesterone receptors and recurrence was also investigated. Materials and Methods: In this study, to determine the amplification of c-Myc oncogenes in breast cancer patients, the multiplex PCR technique was used. After extracting DNA from 100 tumor tissue and 8 normal breast tissue samples, amplification of c-Myc gene was determined by coamplification of a single-copy reference gene, g-IFN, and the target gene c-myc in PCR reaction and using the Gel analyzer software. In the next step, the correlation of the amplification of this gene with other prognostic factors was investigated. Results: In this study, amplification of the c-Myc gene was observed in 27 of the tumor samples. The statistic analysis showed that amplification of the c-Myc oncogene was significantly associated with the recurrence of breast cancer. There was no significant correlation between amplification of the c-Myc oncogene and other prognostic factors including age, estrogen and progesterone receptors, lymph node involvement, HER/2 expression, tumor size, stage and grade of the disease. Conclusion: Amplification of the c-Myc gene can be used as an independent prognostic factor in predicting the recurrence in breast cancer patients