TAL1 is differentially expressed in the primary tumors of breast cancer patients treated with trastuzumab.
Trastuzumab, a monoclonal antibody targeted against the human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) is utilized for the treatment of human breast cancer (1, 2), but a complete understanding of how tumor signal transduction is modulated by trastuzumab treatment is lacking. By mining published and public microarray and gene expression data (3, 4) from the primary tumors of patients treated with trastuzumab, we found that the transcription factor TAL1 was among the genes most differentially expressed in the primary tumors of patients treated with trastuzumab. TAL1 messenger RNA expression was markedly enhanced in the primary tumors of patients treated with trastuzumab. Thus, trastuzumab treatment in patients with breast cancer is associated with increased expression, in primary tumors of the breast, of a transcription factor whose activation by mutation results in development of T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (5-8).