SSEA4 is a marker for chemotherapy resistance [mRNA]

By coupling PDX and cell surface marker screening technologies, we have identified distinct tumor cell sub-populations that are associated with tumor resistance to chemotherapy. In the majority of relapsed tumors, the percentage of the marker-positive cells shifted back to pretreatment levels. SSEA4 is one of the cell surface molecules tested that could distinguish enriched residual tumor cells in all the different TNBC PDX models analyzed. The expression of SSEA4 is associated with tumor resistance to chemotherapy and SSEA4+ cells show increased gene expression of genes involved in response to toxins, cellular import/export, cell migration and EMT. The dataset comprises four different sample groups including SSEA4- and SSEA4+ cell fractions isolated from mouse xenografts of human breast cancer cells. Two technical replicates were generated for each cell fraction. Microarray analysis was performed on the Agilent Whole Human Genome Oligo Microarray 8x60K (v2) platform.