Abstract

1040 Background: The taxanes are an important class of agents for the treatment of a broad range of malignancies including breast cancer. They improve survival in patients with early stage and metastatic breast cancer. Transducin-like enhancer of split 3 (TLE3) is a transcriptional repressor which influences growth and microtubule stability and its expression has been implicated in response to taxane therapy in breast cancer. We investigated the tumor expression of TLE3 in breast cancer patients, including a large cohort of the triple negative subtype. Methods: We analyzed TLE3 (M-201), ER(1D5), PR(PgR636) and HER2/neu(Polyclonal) expression by immunohistochemistry in 978 breast cancer patients. Immunoreactivity was assessed by scoring the percentage of cells stained in each field and by the intensity of staining. Results: To sub-classify the 978 breast cancer patients, we utilized hormone receptors (ER and PR) and HER2 expression/amplification. Overall, 36% of the total breast cancer patients were hormone receptor positive, 15% were HER2 positive and 49% were triple negative. The percentage of triple negative patients was higher in our cohort, given the fact that molecular profiling services are used more frequently for this subtype. A total of 477 patients were triple negative of which 61% stained positive for TLE3 expression. Of the 150 HER2 positive patients, 73% stained positive for TLE3 expression as compared with 82% TLE3 positivity in the 351 hormone receptor positive patients. By pairwise comparison, the hormone receptor positive vs triple-negative subtype showed the highest statistical significance in ratios of TLE3 positives (p =2.5e-10). Conclusions: Our results show that TLE3 is over-expressed in the majority of HER2 positive and hormone receptor positive breast cancer patients. Interestingly, the frequency of over-expression of TLE3 was lowest in the triple negative subtype thereby making it more important to identify those patients in this group who are most likely to respond to taxanes prior to therapy. To our knowledge, this is the first study providing a comprehensive review of TLE expression in breast cancer subtypes.

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