What,
in your view, is the significance of this paper for the field?
It was one of the first papers that reported the
correlation between aberrant p53 tumor suppressor gene and poor
prognosis of breast cancer patients. Many similar studies have been
published thereafter and confirmed that mutations in p53 and other
cancer genes are key determinants of tumor aggressiveness.
What
were the greatest challenges in performing and presenting your work?
At the time when the study was done, I was a
young pathologist with little experience in performing clinically
oriented studies with breast cancer samples. 
The entire process of
planning and executing the experiments, biostatistical analysis of the
data, and writing of the manuscript were all challenging (and very
instructive) to me.
How
did you decide where to submit or publish your paper?
I submitted the study in JNCI because of
its reputation as a "number one" journal in cancer research.
If
you performed your research again, or published your paper again,
what, if anything, would you do differently and why?
Of course much more knowledge has accumulated
during the past years. Methods for analyzing p53 have improved a lot,
but basically I would use the same study setting as in the published
study.
What
are the implications of your work for the future of your field or
neighboring fields?
The p53 study pinpointed the importance of a
cancer gene aberration with regard to a patient's overall survival.
Currently the emphasis is more on studies which try to identify gene
aberrations which could predict the patient's response to
chemotherapy. Information on such cancer gene aberrations would be
very useful for the oncologists when they select among the different
forms of chemotherapy for individual breast cancer patients. My
research group is currently studying another gene at chromosome 17,
the topoisomerase II-alpha, the aberrations of which may predict
response to certain chemotherapeutic agents.
How
do you see the current state of affairs in your field and its
prospects for the future?
Cancer genomics is progressing very fast. I
anticipate that the pathogenesis of the most common forms of human
cancers (breast and prostate cancers) will be solved within the next
5-10 years. Based on the improved understanding of the disease, new
forms of more and more effective therapies are likely to be developed
for the benefit of cancer patients.
Dr. Jorma Isola
Tampere University and University Hospital
Institute of Medical Technology
Tampere, Finland
r. Jorma Isola, Acting Professor of
Biotechnology and Medical Technology at Tampere University in
Finland, discusses his work with the p53 tumor suppressor gene
in relation to breast cancer prognosis. His paper,
"Association of overexpression of tumor suppressor
protein p53 with rapid cell-proliferation and poor prognosis
in node-negative breast-cancer patients" (Journal of the
National Cancer Institute, 84[14]: 1109-14, 15 July 1992), has
been cited a total of 289 times to date, placing it among the
top 30 most-cited papers in breast cancer research of the 1990s.
