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. 2015 Nov 25;17:146. doi: 10.1186/s13058-015-0652-6

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© Aloia et al. 2015

Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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Fig. 7 — Expression of CMP-N-acetylneuraminate-β-galactosamide-α-2,3-sialyltransferase 2 (ST3GAL2) correlates with breast cancer patients’ prognosis. The predictive value of ST3GAL2 was evaluated using a large, publicly available clinical microarray database based on breast tumors from 2977 patients [15]. Estrogen receptor–negative (ER⁻) patients and ER⁻/progesterone receptor –negative (PR⁻) patients displayed highly significant differences (p < 0.01) trending toward a poorer prognosis for patients expressing higher levels of ST3GAL2 (a). When we focused on patients treated with chemotherapy, we observed a highly significant reduction of relapse-free survival independent of the tumor subtype [p < 0.01, hazard ratio (HR) 1.91] in ER⁻ patients (p < 0.01, HR 2.97) and in double-negative patients (p < 0.01, HR 3.08) among patients expressing high levels of ST3GAL2 (b). Also, when we applied distant metastasis-free survival as a primary endpoint, we found that patients treated with chemotherapy had a worse prognosis when expressing high levels of ST3GAL2 (c).