Immunohistochemical Evaluation of Benign and Malignant Lesions of Breast using Survivin and p53

Background: Survivin is a cancer gene that is silenced in differentiated tissues, while overexpressed at high levels in vast majority of tumours. Some essential properties characterizing it as an ideal target involving apoptosis, promoting mitosis, stimulating vessel growth thus associated with poor prognosis, drug and chemo-resistance. The p53 gene is a tumour suppressor gene, defective p53 allows abnormal cells to proliferate resulting and cancer. The study aims to assess the expression of p53 and survivin in benign and malignant breast lesions and its prognostic importance. Materials and Methods: Total number of 102 patients were included in the study. Histopathologically confirmed 46 untreated female patients with Invasive breast carcinoma-NST and 56 female patients with fibroadenoma were used. Expression of survivin and p53 was evaluated using immunohistochemistry staining method. Results: In our study, we found 84.79% cases of invasive breast carcinoma-NST and 55.4% cases of fibroadenoma stained positive for p53, while 76.09% cases of invasive breast carcinoma and 71.42% cases of fibroadenoma stained positive for survivin. Conclusion: Increased expression of survivin and p53 noted in invasive breast carcinoma-NST as compared to fibroadenoma suggested that survivin and p53 are likely to contribute significantly to apoptosis resistance and may serve as therapeutic target that increase the effectiveness of conventional breast cancer therapy.