On-treatment transcriptional profiling in HER2+ inflammatory breast cancer

Inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) is a rare and understudied disease, with 40% of cases presenting with HER2-positive IBC. Within a cohort of newly diagnosed patients with HER2-positive IBC, we sought to (i) assess the pathologic complete response (pCR) rate of short-term neoadjuvant dual-HER2-blockade and paclitaxel, (ii) define baseline and on-treatment transcriptional profiles of tumor biopsies that are associated with pCR, and (iii) identify biologic pathways that may explain the effect of neoadjuvant therapy on pathologic tumor response. Comparative gene expression profiling analysis of RNA-seq data of tumor biopsies