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. Overall design: Comparative gene expression profiling analysis of RNA-seq data of tumor biopsies