An immune response gene expression module identifies a good prognosis subtype in estrogen receptor negative breast cancer

Andrew E Teschendorff¹ , Ahmad Miremadi² , Sarah E Pinder² , Ian O Ellis³ and Carlos Caldas¹^,2

¹Breast Cancer Functional Genomics Laboratory, Cancer Research UK Cambridge Research Institute and Department of Oncology, University of Cambridge, Robinson Way, Cambridge CB2 0RE, UK

²Cambridge Breast Unit, Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 0QQ, UK

³Histopathology, Nottingham City Hospital NHS Trust and Department of Pathology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG5 1PB, UK

author email corresponding author email

Genome Biology 2007, 8:R157doi:10.1186/gb-2007-8-8-r157


Published:	2 August 2007

Subject areas: Cancer, Immunology, Genome studies, Bioinformatics

Abstract

Background

Estrogen receptor (ER)-negative breast cancer specimens are predominantly of high grade, have frequent p53 mutations, and are broadly divided into HER2-positive and basal subtypes. Although ER-negative disease has overall worse prognosis than does ER-positive breast cancer, not all ER-negative breast cancer patients have poor clinical outcome. Reliable identification of ER-negative tumors that have a good prognosis is not yet possible.

Results

We apply a recently proposed feature selection method in an integrative analysis of three major microarray expression datasets to identify molecular subclasses and prognostic markers in ER-negative breast cancer. We find a subclass of basal tumors, characterized by over-expression of immune response genes, which has a better prognosis than the rest of ER-negative breast cancers. Moreover, we show that, in contrast to ER-positive tumours, the majority of prognostic markers in ER-negative breast cancer are over-expressed in the good prognosis group and are associated with activation of complement and immune response pathways. Specifically, we identify an immune response related seven-gene module and show that downregulation of this module confers greater risk for distant metastasis (hazard ratio 2.02, 95% confidence interval 1.2-3.4; P = 0.009), independent of lymph node status and lymphocytic infiltration. Furthermore, we validate the immune response module using two additional independent datasets.

Conclusion

We show that ER-negative basal breast cancer is a heterogeneous disease with at least four main subtypes. Furthermore, we show that the heterogeneity in clinical outcome of ER-negative breast cancer is related to the variability in expression levels of complement and immune response pathway genes, independent of lymphocytic infiltration.