ALDH1 expression in inflammatory breast cancer tumor using real-time RT-PCR gene expression quantifications: Moroccan prospective study

Inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) is a rare but aggressive type of breast carcinoma. There are few diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers in IBC. Aldehyde dehydrogenase 1 (ALDH1) is a putative stem cell marker in a variety of cancers. Our study aims to investigate the expressions of the ALDH1 in a cohort of IBC tumors and to assess the relationship of their expression with Notch1 and some clinic-pathological characteristics. Methods: We investigated the status of ALDH1 and Notch1 in 81 female IBC cases. Paraffin-embedded tumor tissues (FFPE: formalin-fixed paraffin embedded) were obtained from all cases and to mRNA was extracted from FFPE tissue. Pure RNA was used for the synthesis of cDNA, which was used for quantitative real-time RT-PCR (qRT-PCR) analysis of relative expression levels of target genes. Results: Positive ALDH1 (ALDH1+) and Notch1 (Notch1+) expression was observed in 69 (85%) of 81 IBC cases. Of the ALDH1+ tumours, 29 (34.9%) were of the luminal subtype, 21 (25.3%) were in the HER2 subtype and one (1.5%) was in the unclassified category. In addition, 32 (38.2%) were triple-negative tumours. The majority 50 (60.2%) of ALDH1+ cases were high-grade ductal carcinomas. ALDH1 expression is significantly correlated with age, response treatment and Notch1 expression (p < 0.05). Interestingly, statistic analysis using Khi2 test shows that the positively ALDH1 and Notch1 have an interactive effect IBC cases (p < 0.05). Conclusion: This finding reflects that the assessment of ALDH1 expression may have a potential role in incidence of IBC and be helpful tool in the future anticancer strategies.