Global microRNA expression profiling of high-risk ER+ breast cancers from patients receiving adjuvant Tamoxifen mono-therapy: a DBCG study

Purpose: Despite the benefits of estrogen receptor (ER)-targeted endocrine therapies in breast cancer, many tumors develop resistance. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have been suggested as promising biomarkers and we here evaluated whether a miRNA profile could be identified, sub-grouping ER+ breast cancer patients treated with adjuvant Tamoxifen with regards to probability of recurrence. Experimental design: Global miRNA analysis was performed on 152 ER+ primary tumors from high-risk breast cancer patients with an initial discovery set of 52 patients, followed by 2 independent test sets (N=60 and N=40). All patients had received adjuvant Tamoxifen as mono-therapy (median clinical follow-up: 4.6 years) and half had developed distant recurrence (median time-to-recurrence: 3.5 years). MiRNA expression was examined by unsupervised hierarchical clustering and supervised analysis, including clinical parameters as co-variables. 3 parts of microRNA profiling of ER+ breast cancer samples