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Lani · 10-18-2006, 03:08 PM

In addition:They postulated there are two main sequences/pathways that breast cancer follow in developing more and more mutations which make cells more and more immortal and proliferative--one which the normal and luminal A take (ER+her2-) with lots of chromosome 16q loss and associated with good prognosis and one which basal(triple negative) ERBB2 (her2+er-) and luminal B (some, but not all, of which are her2+ER+) which are not associated with lots of chromosome 16q deletion and have a worse prognosis. Interestingly they seemed to use ER of 2% as the cut-off for ER+ so their percentage ER positive comes out interestingly for basals and ERBB2s. As we have pointed out before, there are many ways to measure ER and not all are accurate nor do they necessarily concur with each other.

I was interested to see that they found a shorter DFS for her2+s than for basals. This was not a huge study, but opens the way for larger studies.

They will have to go further back in their archive of tumors(may not be easy because, althought they did not say it outright in the original article, it sounded like they used fresh tumor or fresh frozen tumor rather than paraffin embedded tumor to do their studies) to get the results of DFS without tam tx, without AI tx, without chemotherapy, with and without herceptin for us to discover not only the natural history, but also the results of different treatments on these tumors.

Hope this article elucidated more than it confused!

10-18-2006, 03:08 PM	#76
Lani Senior Member Join Date: Mar 2006 Posts: 4,778	Hopeful, you did fantastically! In addition:They postulated there are two main sequences/pathways that breast cancer follow in developing more and more mutations which make cells more and more immortal and proliferative--one which the normal and luminal A take (ER+her2-) with lots of chromosome 16q loss and associated with good prognosis and one which basal(triple negative) ERBB2 (her2+er-) and luminal B (some, but not all, of which are her2+ER+) which are not associated with lots of chromosome 16q deletion and have a worse prognosis. Interestingly they seemed to use ER of 2% as the cut-off for ER+ so their percentage ER positive comes out interestingly for basals and ERBB2s. As we have pointed out before, there are many ways to measure ER and not all are accurate nor do they necessarily concur with each other. I was interested to see that they found a shorter DFS for her2+s than for basals. This was not a huge study, but opens the way for larger studies. They will have to go further back in their archive of tumors(may not be easy because, althought they did not say it outright in the original article, it sounded like they used fresh tumor or fresh frozen tumor rather than paraffin embedded tumor to do their studies) to get the results of DFS without tam tx, without AI tx, without chemotherapy, with and without herceptin for us to discover not only the natural history, but also the results of different treatments on these tumors. Hope this article elucidated more than it confused!