Breaking News: Latest Publication by UMBI on Cancer

The cancer research group in UMBI has just published an original article in the International Journal of Oncology (Minning et al. Int J Oncol;45:1959-1968, 2014). The IJO is a Q2 journal in the oncology discipline with an impact factor of 2.773. This was an ambitious project on breast cancers which involves the epigenetic and gene expression analysis and the integrated analysis of the two datasets obtained. A total of 76 fresh-frozen primary breast tumor tissues and 25 adjacent non-cancerous tissues were profiled. Integrated analysis indentified 51 genes with hypermethylation with low expression (negative association) and 13 genes with hypermethylation and high expression (positive association). Most of the overlapping genes are involved in focal adhesion and extracellular matrix-receptor interaction. This project was jointly led by Professor Datuk Dr. A Rahman A Jamal and Associate Professor Dr. Norfilza Mokhtar in collaboration with the breast surgeons from the UKM Medical Centre and from Hospital Kuala Lumpur. This was also an MSc project by Ms Chin Minning. The study was funded mainly by a grant from the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (07-05-MGI-GMB016) and partly by a grant from the Ministry of Health. This publication again proves that our local researchers can come up with good impact publications in cancer research despite limited funding and very high competitiveness globally.