B5

Survivin and bcl-2 are inhibitors of apoptosis while mutant p53 is a tumour suppressor protein with lost functional ability. It is generally agreed that accumulated p53 represents the mutated type and not the wild type in cancer. Furthermore, Significant correlations between survivin and p53, or bcl-2 expression have been reported previously. This finding is very important to demonstrate the link between these two anti apoptosis proteins and the role of mutant p53 in cancer. In breast cancer, bcl-2 has a significant inverse correlation with mutant p53 whereas the wild-type p53 represses survivin expression at both mRNA and protein levels. This work has been set to study the correlations of expression between survivin, bcl-2 and p53 in infiltrating ductal carcinoma of the breast. A total number of 382 cases have been collected from three hospitals in The North-East of Malaysia. Highly significant statistical correlations (p<0.001) were established between the expression of the markers under study. Such significant correlations may imply that the alterations in the expression may have taken place together in a concerted fashion, and further implying that many of these cases could possibly share common aetiologies and molecular abnormalities. They also suggest that therapeutic interventions may yield successful results should the right targets be addressed.

[Fifth AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research, Nov 12-15, 2006]