DNA methylation profiling identifies two distinct subgroups in breast cancers with low hormone receptor expression, mainly associated with HER2 amplification status.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Current clinical guidelines suggest that breast cancers with low hormone receptor expression (LowHR) in 1-10% of tumor cells should be regarded as hormone receptor positive. However, clinical data show that these patients have worse outcome compared to patients with hormone receptor expression above 10%. We performed DNA methylation profiling on 23 LowHR breast cancer specimens, including 13 samples with HER2 amplification and compared our results with a reference breast cancer cohort from The Cancer Genome Atlas to clarify the status for this infrequent but important patient subgroup.

Results

In unsupervised clustering and dimensionality reduction, breast cancers with low hormone receptor expression that lacked HER2 amplification usually clustered with triple neg

SUBMITTER: Jurmeister P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8489064 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature