TNFSF8 (CD153 / CD30L) 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 TNFSF8, also known as CD153 and CD30 ligand (CD30L) was among the genes most differentially expressed in the primary tumors of patients treated with trastuzumab. TNFSF8 messenger RNA expression was significantly 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 marker with broad expression in multiple human cancers of the hematopoietic system (5, 6), and with the capacity to regulate immunoglobulin class switching (7).