Are triple-negative tumours and basal-like breast cancer synonymous? Authors' response
Bas Kreike,Marc J. van de Vijver +1 more
Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
The issues raised by Rakha and colleagues in their response to the recent research article are addressed and it is shown that some of these tumours have the gene expression pattern of triple-negative tumours – these are in fact the TNP tumours from this unselected series of tumours.Abstract:
We read with interest the issues raised by Rakha and colleagues [1] in their response to our recent research article [2], and we are pleased to address them. An important conclusion from our research article is that triple-negative breast cancer can be equated to basal-like breast cancer. In their letter, Rakha and colleagues [1] state that equating triple-negative phenotype (TNP) tumours with basal-like breast cancer is misleading and is not supported by the data we have presented.
It is important to realize that, as we have also pointed out in our article [2], the basal-like breast cancer subtype was initially defined based on the gene expression pattern of the so-called 'intrinsic gene list' in only six breast tumours [3]. Since this initial report, the intrinsic gene list that is used to identify basal-like breast tumours has been updated multiple times [3-5]. This shows that a gene-expression-based definition of basal-like breast cancer has its limitations.
There are two reasons for Rakha and colleagues [1] to dispute our results. First, there are nine triple-negative tumours that have a gene expression pattern that is not strongly correlated to the basal-like centroid. However, when we do not set the threshold for the correlation coefficient to the molecular subtype centroids at 0.1, but simply look at the closest centroid, all our unclassifiable samples will be allocated to the basal-like subtype. This leaves only the four samples that are allocated to the normal epithelial-like subtype. This is a problematic group, as it was originally defined on the basis of samples that did not contain tumour cells after neoadjuvant chemotherapy treatment and there are many similarities between this subtype and the basal-like subtype [3].
Second, Rakha and colleagues [1] state that '18.6% of non-TNP cancers cluster together with TNP cancers in the "basal-like" cluster'. This argument is based on an incorrect understanding of our findings. These 18.6% are not part of a series of tumours that were all negative for a TNP, but 18.6% of a series of tumours not selected for TNP. These tumours include both TNP and non-TNP samples. In Additional file 1 [2], it is shown that some of these tumours have the gene expression pattern of triple-negative tumours – these are in fact the TNP tumours from this unselected series of tumours. This lends even greater support to the notion that triple-negative tumours are synonymous with basal-like tumours.
We therefore stand by our results and believe that gene expression profiling studies have highlighted the importance of basal-like/TNP tumours but that simple immunohisto-chemistry is sufficient to classify these tumours.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
A clinically relevant gene signature in triple negative and basal-like breast cancer
Achim Rody,Thomas Karn,Cornelia Liedtke,Lajos Pusztai,E. Ruckhaeberle,Lars Hanker,Regine Gaetje,Christine Solbach,A. Ahr,Dirk Metzler,Marcus Schmidt,Volkmar Müller,Uwe Holtrich,Manfred Kaufmann +13 more
TL;DR: A ratio of high B-cell presence and low IL-8 activity as a powerful new prognostic marker for TNBC is described and inhibition of theIL-8 pathway also represents an attractive novel therapeutic target for this disease.
Journal ArticleDOI
Clinical and biologic features of triple-negative breast cancers in a large cohort of patients with long-term follow-up.
Luca Malorni,Priya B. Shetty,C. De Angelis,SG Hilsenbeck,Mothaffar F. Rimawi,Richard M Elledge,CK Osborne,S. De Placido,Grazia Arpino +8 more
TL;DR: Clinical outcomes of TN BC and implications of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) expression are analyzed; TN tumors have a worse outcome in systemically treated patients but not in untreated patients; and EGFR expression, does not predict for worse long-term survival.
Journal ArticleDOI
EGFR and HER-2/neu expression in invasive apocrine carcinoma of the breast
Semir Vranic,Ossama Tawfik,Juan P. Palazzo,Nurija Bilalovic,Eduardo Eyzaguirre,Lisa Mj Lee,Patrick A. Adegboyega,Jill M. Hagenkord,Zoran Gatalica +8 more
TL;DR: It was showed that apocrine breast carcinomas are molecularly diverse group of carcinomas, whereas apocrine-like carcinomas predominantly belong to the luminal phenotype.
Journal ArticleDOI
Vascular characterisation of triple negative breast carcinomas using dynamic MRI
Sonia P. Li,Anwar R. Padhani,N. Jane Taylor,Mark Beresford,Mei-Lin Ah-See,J. James Stirling,James A. d’Arcy,David J. Collins,Andreas Makris +8 more
TL;DR: TNBC possess characteristic features on imaging, with lower extracellular space (higher cell density) and higher contrast agent wash-out rate (higher vascular permeability) suggesting a distinctive phenotype detectable by MRI.
Journal ArticleDOI
Increased expression of osteopontin in patients with triple-negative breast cancer.
TL;DR: The goal of the study was to evaluate osteopontin protein expression levels in triple‐negative breast carcinomas to determine if they correlated with clinicopathological parameters, thus providing additional support for osteoponin functioning and better understanding of triple-negative breast cancer.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Molecular portraits of human breast tumours
Charles M. Perou,Therese Sørlie,Michael B. Eisen,Matt van de Rijn,Stefanie S. Jeffrey,Christian A. Rees,Jonathan R. Pollack,Douglas T. Ross,Hilde Johnsen,Lars A. Akslen,Øystein Fluge,Alexander Pergamenschikov,Cheryl A. Williams,Shirley Zhu,Per Eystein Lønning,Anne Lise Børresen-Dale,Patrick O. Brown,David Botstein +17 more
TL;DR: Variation in gene expression patterns in a set of 65 surgical specimens of human breast tumours from 42 different individuals were characterized using complementary DNA microarrays representing 8,102 human genes, providing a distinctive molecular portrait of each tumour.
Journal ArticleDOI
Repeated observation of breast tumor subtypes in independent gene expression data sets
Therese Sørlie,Robert Tibshirani,Joel S. Parker,Trevor Hastie,James Stephen Marron,Andrew B. Nobel,Shibing Deng,Hilde Johnsen,Robert Pesich,Stephanie Geisler,Janos Demeter,Charles M. Perou,Per Eystein Lønning,Patrick O. Brown,Anne Lise Børresen-Dale,David Botstein +15 more
TL;DR: The results strongly support the idea that many of these breast tumor subtypes represent biologically distinct disease entities.
Journal ArticleDOI
The molecular portraits of breast tumors are conserved across microarray platforms
Zhiyuan Hu,Cheng Fan,Daniel S. Oh,James Stephen Marron,Xiaping He,Bahjat F. Qaqish,Chad A. Livasy,Lisa A. Carey,Evangeline R Reynolds,Lynn G. Dressler,Andrew B. Nobel,Joel S. Parker,Matthew G. Ewend,Lynda R. Sawyer,Junyuan Wu,Yudong Liu,Rita Nanda,Maria Tretiakova,Alejandra Ruiz Orrico,Donna Dreher,Juan P. Palazzo,Laurent Perreard,Edward W. Nelson,Mary C. Mone,Heidi Theil Hansen,Michael Mullins,John Quackenbush,Matthew J. Ellis,Olufunmilayo I. Olopade,Philip S. Bernard,Charles M. Perou +30 more
TL;DR: This study validates the "breast tumor intrinsic" subtype classification as an objective means of tumor classification that should be translated into a clinical assay for further retrospective and prospective validation.
Journal ArticleDOI
Gene expression profiling and histopathological characterization of triple-negative/basal-like breast carcinomas.
Bas Kreike,Marieke van Kouwenhove,Hugo M. Horlings,Britta Weigelt,Hans Peterse,Harry Bartelink,Marc J. van de Vijver +6 more
TL;DR: Triple-negative tumors are synonymous with basal-like tumors, and can be identified by immunohistochemistry, based on gene-expression profiling, which revealed five distinct subgroups of triple-negative breast cancers.
Journal ArticleDOI
Are triple-negative tumours and basal-like breast cancer synonymous?
Emad A. Rakha,David S.P. Tan,William D. Foulkes,Ian O. Ellis,Andrew Tutt,Torsten O. Nielsen,Jorge S. Reis-Filho +6 more
TL;DR: The results of the study are in agreement with those of several previously published comparisons on the IHC features of basal-like breast cancers, and it is reasonable to conclude that the above findings do not demonstrate that TNP tumours are synonymous with basal- like tumours.
Related Papers (5)
Molecular portraits of human breast tumours
Charles M. Perou,Therese Sørlie,Michael B. Eisen,Matt van de Rijn,Stefanie S. Jeffrey,Christian A. Rees,Jonathan R. Pollack,Douglas T. Ross,Hilde Johnsen,Lars A. Akslen,Øystein Fluge,Alexander Pergamenschikov,Cheryl A. Williams,Shirley Zhu,Per Eystein Lønning,Anne Lise Børresen-Dale,Patrick O. Brown,David Botstein +17 more