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Squamous cell carcinoma antigen linked to high-grade, advanced breast cancer
Catanzaro JM. PLoS One. 2011;doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0019096.
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Clinicians have long used elevated squamous cell carcinoma antigen levels as a diagnostic marker for uterine, cervix, lung, head and neck, esophageal and liver cancers. Now, researchers have found that squamous cell carcinoma antigen expression may also be useful in detecting breast cancer, as well as predicting the grade and stage of the carcinoma.
After identifying squamous cell carcinoma antigen (SCCA) expression in five of six breast cancer cell lines examined in the preliminary stages of the study and detecting elevated SCCA expression in four high-grade and one low-grade tumor in a breast carcinoma progression tissue microarray obtained from the Cooperative Human Tissue Network at the University of Virginia, Wei-Xing Zong, PhD, associate professor in the department of molecular genetics and microbiology at Stony Brook University in New York, and colleagues decided to further investigate SCCA expression in breast tissue samples.
Results were first published in PLoS One.
The researchers performed immunohistochemical analysis of SCCA expression on 1,360 breast tumor tissue and 124 breast epithelium tissue microarrays and discovered that expression correlated with cancer grade — occurring in 0.3% of grade-1 cancers, 2.5% of grade-2 cancers and 9.4% of grade-3 cancers (P<.0001).
A similar correlation was observed when the breast tissue samples were categorized according to three nonmetastatic tumor, node, metastasis stages, with SCCA expression observed in 2.4% of stage I cancers, 3.1% of stage II cancers and 8.6% of stage III cancers (P=.0005). No positive staining was observed in any of the 124 samples of non-neoplastic breast tissue.
“Here, our study shows for the first time that elevated expression of SCCA is associated with both high grade and advanced stage human breast carcinomas,” the researchers wrote.
Furthermore, SCCA positivity in grade-2 and grade-3 breast cancers was indicative of lower OS — on average, 88 months compared with 188 months in patients with SCCA-negative cancers. Recurrence-free survival was also lower (42.2% vs. 74.4%).
The percentage of breast carcinomas with SCCA positivity may have been underestimated in the study, according to the researchers, because of the nature of the tissue microarrays used and the small tissue specimen sizes. They said whole section biopsy samples may help more accurately assess the association between SCCA expression and breast cancer.
“Despite its clear clinical relevance, the biological function of SCCA remains unclear,” the researchers wrote.
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