Therapeutic targeting in HER2+ breast cancer to prevent and treat CNS disease: HFE.

Treatments targeted toward HER2+ breast cancers are limited (1-4). Unbiased discovery approaches have the potential to illuminate subtype-specific vulnerabilities.  We performed whole transcriptome differential gene expression analysis of primary tumors of the breast from patients with HER2+ breast cancer, as compared to primary tumors of the breast from patients with breast cancer of other PAM50 molecular subtypes: luminal A, luminal B, basal and normal-like, using published microarray data (5-7). We discovered differential expression of HFE in human HER2+ breast cancer.   HFE mRNA was present in higher quantities in tumors of the breast from patients with HER2+ breast cancer as compared to primary tumors of the breast from patients with basal and luminal subtype breast cancers.  HFE  expression and function is likely informative in providing some level of molecular description of the HER2+ subtype; HFE is a candidate molecule in a targeted therapeutics approach in HER2+ breast cancer.