CTC-338M12.4, an uncharacterized locus, is differentially expressed in metastatic breast cancer.
Metastasis to the brain is a clinical problem in patients with breast cancer (1-3). We mined published microarray data (4, 5) to compare primary and metastatic tumor transcriptomes to discover genes associated with brain metastasis in patients with metastatic breast cancer. We found that that an uncharacterized locus, CTC-338M12.4 (LOC101928649), was among the genes whose expression was most different in the brain metastases of patients with metastatic breast cancer as compared to primary tumors of the breast. CTC-338M12.4 was also differentially expressed in primary tumors of the breast when compared to normal breast tissue. CTC-338M12.4 mRNA was present at significantly higher quantities in brain metastases as compared to primary tumors of the breast. Molecular functions and up-regulation of CTC-338M12.4 may be an important event for metastasis of primary tumor-derived cancer cells to the brain in humans with metastatic breast cancer.