CD300LG (Nepmucin) is differentially expressed in brain metastatic breast cancer.
Brain metastases affect up to 34% of breast cancer patients treated with trastuzumab (1). Limited treatment options are available for clinical control of brain metastatic breast cancer (2-4). We mined published microarray data (5, 6) to identify genes associated with metastasis to the brain in human breast cancer. This unbiased, global gene expression analysis identified differential expression of CD300LG as a transcriptional feature of brain metastasis in patients with breast cancer. Messenger RNA for CD300LG was present at significantly lower quantities in the brain metastatic tissues of patients with metastatic breast cancer. Additional microarray analysis revealed that CD300LG was also among the genes whose expression, transcriptome-wide, was most significantly different in primary tumors of the breast when compared to normal breast tissues. CD300LG is part of the transcriptional signature of human metastatic breast cancer.