GSE58644 Expression Data

The prognostic ease and difficulty of invasive breast carcinoma. Breast carcinoma (BC) have been extensively profiled by high-throughput technologies for over a decade, and broadly speaking, these studies can be grouped into those that seek to identify patient subtypes (studies of heterogeneity) or those that seek to identify gene signatures with prognostic or predictive capacity. The shear number of reported signatures has led to speculation that everything is prognostic in BC. Here we show that this ubiquity is an apparition caused by a poor understanding of the inter- relatedness between subtype and the molecular determinants of prognosis. Our approach constructively shows how to avoid confounding due to a patient's subtype, clinicopathological or treatment profile.