Cell-in-cell structures are involved in the competition between cells in breast cancer

TL;DR

This study investigates the role of cell-in-cell structures in breast cancer by analyzing gene expression data, revealing pathways associated with CIC formation and potential links to tumor prognosis.

Contribution

It provides a genetic and pathway analysis of CICs in breast cancer, highlighting key genes and signaling pathways involved in CIC formation.

Findings

Overexpression of specific genes linked to CICs.

Pathways like focal adhesion and PI3K-Akt are involved.

CIC presence may relate to tumor prognosis.

Abstract

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide, and discovering the biomarkers of this disease became so vital nowadays and Cell in Cell structure could be one of them, and it may be used as an available proxy for tumor malignancy. (CICs) are unusual in that keep morphologically healthy cells within another cell. They are found in various human cancers and result from active cell-cell interaction, and it has different kinds. In this study, we analyzed the microarray data from GEO (GSE103865) to genetically evaluate CICs' incidence in samples obtained from breast cancer patients to understand the relationship between the rate of CIC and the prognosis of breast cancer. The preprocessing was performed using R software. The DAVID website was used to analyze gene ontology (GO) and Gene and Genome (KEGG) pathways. The protein-protein interactions (PPIs) of the obtained DEGs were assessed using the STRING website, and hub modules in Cytoscape and cytoHubba were screened. According to the results from analyzing the 20 hub genes, we understood that overexpression of our Top genes is effective in focal adhesion, ECM-receptor interaction, platelet activation and PI3K-Akt signaling pathway, which shows that changes in these pathways could be the reason the overexpression of CICs in breast cancer. These data and research by many others have uncovered various genes involved in CIC formation and have started to give us an idea of why they are formed and how they could contribute to breast cancer