Predicting the Course

Canadian researchers found that determining how different proteins interact in tumors can be used to predict a woman's chances at surviving breast cancer. As they report in Nature Biotechnology, scientists led by the University of Toronto's Jeffrey Wrana first scoured the literature for proteins that interact with many other proteins and then looked at genome-wide expression from 79 human tissues to identify in which tissues interacting proteins were co-expressed to identify hub proteins. They then applied that approach to studying breast cancer tissues from 350 women and saw that women who survived the disease had a different protein network organization than those who did not.