Abstract
Despite recent advances in chemotherapy, the prognosis for patients with advanced gastric cancer (GC) or gastroesophageal junction cancer remains poor. Human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) is a novel target for biologic therapy in metastatic GC. We analyzed the association between HER2 overexpression and the clinicopathologic characteristics of advanced GC. Formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded tumor samples were collected from patients with stage III or to IV (M(0)) GC who subsequently underwent curative surgery followed by adjuvant chemotherapy with 5-fluorouracil and cisplatin. All the samples were analyzed for HER2 status by immunohistochemistry (IHC) and fluorescence in situ hybridization. Of 142 samples analyzed, 7.1% scored IHC 2+ and 8.6% scored IHC 3+, whereas 9.3% were HER2-amplified. Of HER2-amplified cases, 76.9% (10/13) scored IHC 3+, showing the correlation between HER2 amplification and overexpression (P=0.01). HER2 IHC 3+ cases were more common in the intestinal-type tumors compared with diffuse-type tumors (16.7% vs. 5.1%, respectively; P=0.049), and a nonsignificant trend was observed using fluorescence in situ hybridization (14.3% vs. 9.2%, respectively; P=0.399). HER2 gene amplification was more frequent in stage IV (M(0)) than stage III disease (15.4% vs. 4.0%, respectively; P=0.037). Interestingly, HER2-amplified disease was more common than nonamplified disease in patients with nodal stage 3 tumors (76.9% vs. 38.6%, respectively; P=0.009); a similar pattern was observed using IHC. HER2 overexpression correlated with nodal stage, and a lymph node ratio greater than 0.5 was more common in HER2-amplified tumors than HER2-nonamplified tumors (69.2% vs. 43.3%, respectively; P=0.086). These findings suggest that further investigations of adjuvant therapy with HER2-targeted therapy for advanced GC are warranted.
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