Expression of stathmin in tumor to predict response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy with docetaxel-containing regimens in locally advanced breast cancer.

e11566 Background: We performed this retrospective study to evaluate the value of clinicopathological factors and a novel molecular marker stathmin in predicting treatment response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NCT) with docetaxel-containing regimens in patients with locally advanced breast cancer. Methods: Fifty-four consecutive locally advanced patients receiving docetaxel-containing NCT between January 2006 and July 2010 in Zhejiang Cancer Hospital were included. The expression levels of estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR), epidermal growth factor receptor-2 (HER-2), and p53 were detected by immunohistochemistry, while expression of stathmin mRNA was measured by Quanti-Gene assay. Results: The overall clinical objective response (cOR) rate was 75.9% (41/54) in breast. A total of 34 patients (63.0%) experienced pathological OR (pOR), with pathological complete remission (pCR) rate of 20.4% (11/54) in breast and 16.7% (9/54) in both breast and axilla. In univariate analysis, there were associations of pOR in both breast and axilla with age (P=0.054), ER status (P=0.059), subtypes (P=0.062), p53 (P=0.030), and stathmin expression (three terciles) (P=0.039). Mean expression of stathmin in pOR group was 0.410, compared with that in no response group of 0.556 (P=0.051 by Student’s t-test). Similarly, a lower expression of stathmin might represent a higher pCR rate (P=0.061). Moreover, the LOWESS smoothing plot showed the same trend, i.e., that tumor with a lower level of stathmin expression had a higher probability of response to docetaxel-containing NCT. After multivariate adjustment, both ER and stathmin kept being significant with hazard ratio of 4.58 (95% CI: 1.11-18.94, P=0.036) and 2.94 (95% CI: 1.26-6.86, P=0.012), respectively. Conclusions: ER and stathmin were independent predictive factors for NCT with docetaxel-containing regimens.