mRNA profiling reveals determinants of trastuzumab efficiency in HER2-positive breast cancer

The intention was to detect genes that are determining trastuzumab efficiency in HER2-positive breast cancer cell lines with different resistance phenotypes. While BT474 should be sensitive to the drug treatment, HCC1954 is expected to be resistant due to a PI3K mutation. The cell line BTR50 has been derived from BT474 and was cultured to be resistant as well. Based on RNA-Seq data, we performed differential expression analyses on these breast cancer cell lines with and without trastuzumab treatment. In detail, five separate tests were performed, namely resistant cells vs. wild type, i.e. HCC1954 and BTR50 vs. BT474, respectively, and untreated vs. drug treated cells. The significant genes of the first two tests should contribute to resistance. The significant genes of the test BT474 vs. its drug treated version should contribute to the trastuzumab effect. To exclude false positives from the combined gene set (#64), we removed ten genes that were also significant in the test BTR50 vs. its drug treated version. This way we ended up with 54 genes that are very likely to determine trastuzumab efficiency in HER2-positive breast cancer cell lines. Overall design: mRNA profiles of human breast cancer cell lines were generated by deep sequencing using Illumina HiSeq 2000. The cell lines BT474 and HCC1954 were analyzed with and without trastuzumab treatment. HCC1954 is known to be trastuzumab resistant. Additionally, the cell line BTR50 was generated as resistant version of BT474, and was analyzed with and without trastuzumab as well.

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von der Heyde S, Wagner S, Czerny A, Nietert M, Ludewig F, Salinas-Riester G, Arlt D, Beißbarth T