Predicting breast cancer metastasis from whole-blood transcriptomic measurements

OBJECTIVE: In this exploratory work we investigate whether blood gene expression measurements predict breast cancer metastasis. Early detection of increased metastatic risk could potentially be life-saving. Our data comes from the Norwegian Women and Cancer epidemiological cohort study. The women who contributed to these data provided a blood sample up to a year before receiving a breast cancer diagnosis. We estimate a penalized maximum likelihood logistic regression. We evaluate this in terms of calibration, concordance probability, and stability, all of which we estimate by the bootstrap. RESULTS: We identify a set of 108 candidate predictor genes that exhibit a fold change in average metastasized observation where there is none for the average non-metastasized observation.