Analysis of prognostic features in patients with breast cancer and colorectal cancer.

Cancers represent second the most common cause of death in the Czech Republic. The most common are breast and colorectal cancers. Identification of prognostic factors improving decision-making approaches for treatment optimization belongs to the key aims of clinical research in oncology. Carriers of mutation in cancer-susceptibility genes represent a small but clinically important group of high-risk patients. The implementation of NGS have accelerated predisposing genes analyses. The large extent of data about the presence of variants in predisposing genes is in striking contrast to only a very limited information available about clinico-pathological characteristics of mutation carriers. Determination of the risk of tumor development in carriers of rare mutations or variants of unclear significance in genes with incomplete penetrance represent substantial drawbacks of current NGS analyses. To address these issues, we have attempted i) to introduce a unified approach to NGS analysis in breast cancer patients, ii) to characterize importance of prognostic factors in BRCA1/BRCA2 mutation carriers, and iii) to identify the cancer risks in carriers of germline mutations in the CHEK2 gene. Colorectal cancer represents seemingly histologically homogeneous disease. However, at the molecular level it can be..