A naturally occurring HER2 carboxy-terminal fragment promotes mammary tumor growth and metastasis.

ABSTRACT: HER2 is a tyrosine kinase receptor causally involved in cancer. A subgroup of breast cancer patients with particularly poor clinical outcomes expresses a heterogeneous collection of HER2 carboxy-terminal fragments (CTFs). However, since the CTFs lack the extracellular domain that drives dimerization and subsequent activation of full-length HER2, they are in principle expected to be inactive. Here we show that at low expression levels one of these fragments, 611-CTF, activated multiple signaling pathways because of its unanticipated ability to constitutively homodimerize. A transcriptomic analysis revealed that 611-CTF specifically controlled the expression of genes that we found to be correlated with poor prognosis in breast cancer. Among the 611-CTF-regulated genes were several that have

SUBMITTER: Pedersen K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2698729 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature