Trastuzumab administration in patients with breast cancer is associated with increased primary tumor expression of STAT3.
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 cell signaling intermediate signal transducer and activator of transcription STAT3 was among the genes most differentially expressed in the primary tumors of patients treated with trastuzumab. STAT3 was expressed at significantly higher levels in the tumors of patients treated with trastuzumab, indicating that trastuzumab is potentially associated with activation of a signal transduction pathway important for survival of breast cancer cells, and demonstrating that a molecule described as an oncogene (5) with constitutive expression in all cell lines transformed by the Src proto-oncogene (6) is present at significantly higher quantities in the tumors of breast cancer patients treated with trastuzumab.