Telethonin is differentially expressed in the brain metastases of patients with 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 telethonin, also known as titin-cap, encoded by TCAP, 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. TCAP mRNA was present at increased quantities in brain metastatic tissues as compared to primary tumors of the breast. Up-regulation of TCAP expression may be of relevance to mechanisms by which tumor cells of the breast metastasize to the brain in humans with metastatic breast cancer.