Metastasis to the brain is a clinical problem in patients with breast cancer (1-3). We mined published microarray data (4, 5) to compare primary and metastatic tumor transcriptomes to discover genes associated with brain metastasis in patients with metastatic breast cancer. We found that the scavenger receptor class A member 5, encoded by SCARA5, was among the genes whose expression was most different in the brain and metastases of patients with metastatic breast cancer as compared to benign or

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... transformed breast tissues. SCARA5 mRNA was present at significantly reduced quantities in brain metastatic tissues as compared to normal breast tissues. Down-regulation of SCARA5 may be an important event for metastasis of primary tumor-derived cancer cells to the brain in humans with metastatic breast cancer, and irrespective of its importance, appears to be a transcriptional event generally associated with metastasis to the brain.