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Breast cancer is the most frequently encountered type of cancer in women since 1 woman out of 9 will develop breast cancer and unfortunately one third of these women will subsequently die from this disease. As for prognostic factors, the currently used factors for predicting response to therapy are suboptimal and insufficient to explain the differences in survival and response observed in the clinical practice. Therefore, we believe that additional factors, which are still not identified, may intervene and interact together. Better understanding the biology of breast cancer and translating our findings into clinically relevant tools is the main aim of our lab.

During the last decade, our lab has mainly used the microarray technology to investigate the biology of breast cancer. Using gene expression profiling, we and others have provided: 1) a molecular classification of breast cancer into clinically relevant subtypes (Sotiriou et al. PNAS 2003), 2) new tools to predict disease recurrence and response to different treatments (Sotiriou et al. JNCI 2006, Desmedt et al. 2007, Desmedt et al. CCR 2008, Desmedt et al. JCO 2011), 3) a better characterization of the breast tumor microenvironment (Toussaint et al. PLoS One 2010; Desmedt et al. submitted); and 4) novel insight into various oncogenic pathways (Loi et al. PNAS 2010) and the process of metastatic progression (Ignatiadis et al. PLoS One 2011).

The last 5 years have witnessed the emergence of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies that have provided a powerful, new approach to complex genetic studies. NGS has enabled sequencing of entire transcriptomes (RNA-Seq), characterization of regulatory and chromatin protein DNA-binding sites, and whole genome sequencing, among others. Our current research makes use of the latest technological development in molecular biology, i.e. NGS as well as the recently introduced genome-wide DNA methylation profiling, to further interrogate the molecular heterogeneity of breast cancer.