Research article
Genomic subtypes of breast cancer identified by array-comparative genomic hybridization display distinct molecular and clinical characteristics
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* Corresponding author: Göran Jönsson goran_b.jonsson@med.lu.se
- † Equal contributors
1 Department of Oncology, Clinical Sciences, Lund University and Skåne University Hospital, Barngatan 2B, SE 22185 Lund, Sweden
2 CREATE Health Strategic Center for Translational Cancer Research, Lund University, BMC C13, SE 22184, Lund, Sweden
3 Lund Strategic Research Center for Stem Cell Biology and Cell Therapy, Lund University, BMC B10, SE 22184, Lund, Sweden
4 Department of Pathology, Landspitali-University Hospital, 101 Reykjavik, Iceland
5 Departments of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Helsinki University Central Hospital, Helsinki, Finland
6 Department of Pathology, Clinical Sciences, Lund University and Skåne University Hospital, SE 22185 Lund, Sweden
7 Department of Pathology, Helsinki University Central Hospital, Helsinki, Finland
8 Department of Clinical Genetics, Helsinki University Central Hospital, Helsinki, Finland
9 Department of Oncology, Helsinki University Central Hospital, Helsinki, Finland
10 Department of Oncology, Landspitali-University Hospital, 101 Reykjavik, Iceland
11 Faculty of Medicine, University of Iceland, 101 Reykjavik, Iceland
Breast Cancer Research 2010, 12:R42 doi:10.1186/bcr2596
Published: 24 June 2010Abstract
Introduction
Breast cancer is a profoundly heterogeneous disease with respect to biologic and clinical behavior. Gene-expression profiling has been used to dissect this complexity and to stratify tumors into intrinsic gene-expression subtypes, associated with distinct biology, patient outcome, and genomic alterations. Additionally, breast tumors occurring in individuals with germline BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations typically fall into distinct subtypes.
Methods
We applied global DNA copy number and gene-expression profiling in 359 breast tumors. All tumors were classified according to intrinsic gene-expression subtypes and included cases from genetically predisposed women. The Genomic Identification of Significant Targets in Cancer (GISTIC) algorithm was used to identify significant DNA copy-number aberrations and genomic subgroups of breast cancer.
Results
We identified 31 genomic regions that were highly amplified in > 1% of the 359 breast tumors. Several amplicons were found to co-occur, the 8p12 and 11q13.3 regions being the most frequent combination besides amplicons on the same chromosomal arm. Unsupervised hierarchical clustering with 133 significant GISTIC regions revealed six genomic subtypes, termed 17q12, basal-complex, luminal-simple, luminal-complex, amplifier, and mixed subtypes. Four of them had striking similarity to intrinsic gene-expression subtypes and showed associations to conventional tumor biomarkers and clinical outcome. However, luminal A-classified tumors were distributed in two main genomic subtypes, luminal-simple and luminal-complex, the former group having a better prognosis, whereas the latter group included also luminal B and the majority of BRCA2-mutated tumors. The basal-complex subtype displayed extensive genomic homogeneity and harbored the majority of BRCA1-mutated tumors. The 17q12 subtype comprised mostly HER2-amplified and HER2-enriched subtype tumors and had the worst prognosis. The amplifier and mixed subtypes contained tumors from all gene-expression subtypes, the former being enriched for 8p12-amplified cases, whereas the mixed subtype included many tumors with predominantly DNA copy-number losses and poor prognosis.
Conclusions
Global DNA copy-number analysis integrated with gene-expression data can be used to dissect the complexity of breast cancer. This revealed six genomic subtypes with different clinical behavior and a striking concordance to the intrinsic subtypes. These genomic subtypes may prove useful for understanding the mechanisms of tumor development and for prognostic and treatment prediction purposes.