Bevacizumab (Avastin) is an approved treatment option by the European Medicines Agency (1) for more than a quarter billion women in the European Union, and despite having its indication withdrawn by the Food and Drug Administration in 2011 is still utilized in clinical trials in the United States (2, 3). We mined published microarray data (4) from the PROMIX trial to understand in an unbiased fashion genes most transcriptionally perturbed by bevacizumab administration and how this interacted with a standard anthracycline and taxane chemotherapeutic regimen, epirubicin and docetaxel. We report here the differential and increased expression of the leukemia inhibitory factor receptor, a gateway to a signaling pathway required for the pluripotency of embryonic stem cells (5, 6), in the primary tumors of women treated with bevacizumab for breast cancer.
YAP-Hippo signalling downstream of leukemia inhibitory factor receptor: implications for breast cancer