Mutation mechanisms of breast cancer among the female population in China

In this paper, we set up a multistage model including both gene mutation and clonal expansion of intermediate cells to fit the dataset of breast cancer in China from 2004 to 2009. Our simulation results show that the maximum number of driver mutations for breast epithelium stem cells of females in China is 13, which is less than the 14 driver mutations of females in the United States of America (USA). In addition, the two-hit model is the optimal one for the tumorigenesis of females in China, which is also different from the three-hit model that was predicted as the optimal model for the tumorigenesis of females in the USA. However, our predictions show that the genomic instability is caused by first three driver mutations which are the same as that using the data from the USA.