TY - JOUR AU - Kündig, Pascale AU - Giesen, Charlotte AU - Jackson, Hartland AU - Bodenmiller, Bernd AU - Papassotirolopus, Bärbel AU - Freiberger, Sandra Nicole AU - Aquino, Catharine AU - Opitz, Lennart AU - Varga, Zsuzsanna PY - 2018 DA - 2018/05/08 TI - Limited utility of tissue micro-arrays in detecting intra-tumoral heterogeneity in stem cell characteristics and tumor progression markers in breast cancer JO - Journal of Translational Medicine SP - 118 VL - 16 IS - 1 AB - Intra-tumoral heterogeneity has been recently addressed in different types of cancer, including breast cancer. A concept describing the origin of intra-tumoral heterogeneity is the cancer stem-cell hypothesis, proposing the existence of cancer stem cells that can self-renew limitlessly and therefore lead to tumor progression. Clonal evolution in accumulated single cell genomic alterations is a further possible explanation in carcinogenesis. In this study, we addressed the question whether intra-tumoral heterogeneity can be reliably detected in tissue-micro-arrays in breast cancer by comparing expression levels of conventional predictive/prognostic tumor markers, tumor progression markers and stem cell markers between central and peripheral tumor areas. SN - 1479-5876 UR - https://doi.org/10.1186/s12967-018-1495-6 DO - 10.1186/s12967-018-1495-6 ID - Kündig2018 ER -