Expression data from human breast cancer tissue

Although cell-in-cell structure (CICs) is often observed in human tumors and is likely to be associated with tumor progression, it is unclear whether CICs indicate different malignant stages and/or inflammatory conditions. In the case of human breast cancer, the frequency of CICs was significantly different from one patient sample to another, which may indicate different malignant stages and/or inflammatory conditions. Therefore, we used microarrays to identified classes of differential genes and to clarify the correlation of CICs with clinical prognosis in future researches. Patient samples were divided into two groups, low CICs formation rate (L-CICs) and high CICs formation rate (H-CICs), and used microarrays to detail the global programme of gene expression underlying cellularisation and identified classes of differential genes during this process. Breast tumor tissue samples were collected from patients at the Military 307 Hospital, Beijing and selected according to low and high CICs formation rate for RNA extraction and hybridization on Affymetrix microarrays. We had attained 7 samples (1-7) for L-CICs and 7 samples (1-7) for H-CICs.