Gene-expression molecular subtyping of triple-negative breast cancer tumours: importance of immune response

IntroductionTriple-negative (TN) breast cancers need to be refined in order to identify therapeutic subgroups of patients. Methods: We conducted an unsupervised analysis of microarray gene-expression profiles of 107 TN breast cancer patients and undertook robust functional annotation of the molecular entities found by means of numerous approaches including immunohistochemistry and gene-expression signatures. An 87 TN external cohort was used for validation. Results: Fuzzy clustering separated TN tumours into three clusters: C1 (22.4%), C2 (44.9%) and C3 (32.7%). C1 patients were older (mean = 64.6 years) than C2 (mean = 56.8 years; P = 0.03) and C3 patients (mean = 51.9 years; P = 0.0004). Histological grade and Nottingham prognostic index were higher in C2 and C3 than in C1 (P 
Source: Breast Cancer Research - Category: Cancer & Oncology Authors: Source Type: research