A miRNA-based signature predicts development of disease recurrence in HER2 positive early breast cancer after adjuvant trastuzumab-based treatment.

Abstract

e12070Background: Adjuvant trastuzumab is the standard treatment for early HER2 positive breast cancer. However, 15%-22% of patients still suffered disease recurrence after adjuvant anti-HER2 treatment. A molecular prognostic model that can reliably stratify patients by risk of developing disease recurrence is urgently needed. Methods: All the patients included were diagnosed as HER2-postive breast cancer and received radical surgery followed by adjuvant trastuzuamb treatment. Using miRNA microarrays, we analyzed the FFPE tumor tissue from14 patients (7 recurrence vs.7 non-recurrence) and identified nine miRNAs that were differentially expressed. Then, we validated the expression of these miRNAs using qRT-PCR in training set (n = 101), and built the miRNA-based classifier using the Cox regression model. We further confirmed the prognostic accuracy of this signature in an internal testing set (n = 57), and an external independent testing set (n = 53) Results: We identified a two-microRNA signature that cla...