Adeel Chaudhary

Ahmed Shokry

Ashraf Dallol

Jamal Sabir

Lina Al-Harbi

BMC Genomics

PubMed

Springer - Publisher Connector

POSTER PRESENTATION Open Access
Array Comparative Genomic hybridization of
breast cancer in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Lina Al-Harbi1, Ahmed Shokry2,3, Jamal Sabir2, Adeel Chaudhary1, Ashraf Dallol1*
From 2nd International Genomic Medical Conference (IGMC 2013)
Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. 24-27 November 2013
Background
Breast cancer is the second most common cause of can-
cer death worldwide and is the most common cancer
among Saudi females [1]. Breast carcinogenesis is asso-
ciated by a wide-array of cytogenomic changes involving
deletions, amplification or translocations of part or
whole chromosome arms. However, there are several
changes that could not be detected at the resolution
offered by classical cytogenetic techniques. Many of
these regions could provide further insight into the dis-
ease and may harbor potential prognostic values. The
development of Array Comparative Genomic Hybridiza-
tion (aCGH) allowed the identification of such regions
at a genomic scale and currently there is a plethora of
scientific publications reporting cytogenomic changes in
different cancer types [2]. Unfortunately, there are no
studies as yet published specifically looking at breast
cancer from Saudi patients.
Materials and methods
In this study, aCGH was performed on twenty breast
cancer tumors and their matching non-tumorous (nor-
mal) tissues using the Agilent 2x400K. Several regions
were identified to be either amplified or deleted in a
tumor-specific manner.
Results
All samples were obtained from female cancer patients
diagnosed with breast cancer and were subjected to breast
lumpectomy surgical procedure. The mean age of this
group is 51.5 years, range: 35.0-70.1 years. 15 cases were
diagnosed with invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC), 2 cases
were diagnosed with invasive lobular carcinoma and 2
cases were fibroadenomas. One case was of mucinous car-
cinoma origin. The main inclusion criteria were the pre-
sence of matching non-malignant normal tissue DNA
from the same patient to be used as a reference DNA for
the aCGH. This is important as it is often difficult to
obtain good normal control DNA for breast cancer. The
most prevalent chromosome imbalances were chromo-
some gains of +1q, +8q, +11q, +16q and +20q. Chromo-
some loss was mostly found in 11p, 13q, 1p, 9q, 16p, 17q,
and Xq. In this study, gains were found in 1q25.1, 16q13-
24, 20q11-13, and 8q21-24. Of the DNA copy number
losses, 1p36 was most common event, followed by 8p, 16q
and 17p.
Conclusions
This is the first report of high resolution comparative
genomic hybridization (aCGH) analysis of breast cancer
from Saudi Arabia. We demonstrate our ability to detect
known regions of amplification and deletions that occur in
a tumor-specific manner. This finding serves as a valida-
tion to our approach as we are able to compare our find-
ings to published benchmarks. We further demonstrate
the potential importance of aCGH in breast cancer diag-
nosis as, through the detection of copy number changes, a
patient sample can be characterized in terms of the cyto-
genetic aberrations it harbors. The detection of 1q, 1p, 8q
amplification events by aCGH and FISH suggests that a
considerably larger study can be established where as a
significantly larger cohort with clinicopathological data
can be analyzed using only FISH analysis. Prognostic bio-
markers can then be identified if correlations could be
made with copy number variations in these regions and
known clinicopathological parameters, especially recur-
rence and survival.
* Correspondence: adallol@kau.edu.sa
1Center of Excellence in Genomic Medicine Research, King Abdulaziz
University, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia
Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
Al-Harbi et al. BMC Genomics 2014, 15(Suppl 2):P66
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/15/S2/P66
© 2014 Al-Harbi et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in
any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Authors’ details
1Center of Excellence in Genomic Medicine Research, King Abdulaziz
University, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia. 2Department of Biological Sciences,
Faculty of Science, King Abdulaziz University, P.O. Box 80141 Jeddah 21589,
Saudi Arabia. 3Agricultural Genetic Engineering Research Institute (AGERI),
Agriculture Research Center (ARC), Giza, Egypt.
Published: 2 April 2014
References
1. Al-Idrissi H: Pattern of breast cancer in Saudi females in eastern province
of Saudi Arabia. Indian journal of medical sciences 1991, 45:85.
2. Albertson DG, Pinkel D: Genomic microarrays in human genetic disease
and cancer. Human molecular genetics 2003, 12:145-152.
doi:10.1186/1471-2164-15-S2-P66
Cite this article as: Al-Harbi et al.: Array Comparative Genomic
hybridization of breast cancer in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. BMC
Genomics 2014 15(Suppl 2):P66.
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Al-Harbi et al. BMC Genomics 2014, 15(Suppl 2):P66
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/15/S2/P66
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Array Comparative Genomic hybridization of breast cancer in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia

http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2164-15-S2-P66

Array Comparative Genomic hybridization of breast cancer in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia

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