Our paper is published in Breast Cancer Research!
”Epigenetic silencing of CREB3L1 by DNA methylation is associated with high-grade metastatic breast cancers with poor prognosis and is prevalent in triple negative breast cancers”. PMID: 26810754.
This paper shows that CREB3L1 expression is increased in low-grade breast tumors as they respond to cell stress within the tumor environment, and then is frequently down regulated (by epigenetic mechanisms) as breast tumors advance to high-grade metastatic tumors. CREB3L1 is a key transcriptional repressor that keeps expression of cancer progression genes low. In this work, we show that down-regulation of CREB3L1 strongly correlates with shorter relapse free survival for breast cancer patients and is an indicator of poor prognosis particularly for those with the luminal A and basal breast cancers. Our data further strengthens the role for CREB3L1 as a metastasis suppressor in breast cancer and demonstrates that epigenetic silencing is a major regulator of the loss of CREB3L1 expression in advanced breast cancers.