Recent translational research: microarray expression profiling of breast cancer – beyond classification and prognostic markers?

Genomic expression profiling has greatly improved our ability to subclassify human breast cancers according to shared molecular characteristics and clinical behavior. The logical next question is whether this technology will be similarly useful for identifying the dominant signaling pathways that drive tumor initiation and progression within each breast cancer subtype. A major challenge will be to integrate data generated from the experimental manipulation of model systems with expression profiles obtained from primary tumors. We highlight some recent progress and discuss several obstacles in the use of expression profiling to identify pathway signatures in human breast cancer.