The tumors of breast cancer patients treated with trastuzumab express significantly increased quantities of CD34.
Trastuzumab (Herceptin) is a monoclonal antibody targeting the extracellular domain of the human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) (1) utilized for the treatment of adjuvant and metastatic breast cancer (2) in the United States and worldwide. We mined published and public microarray and gene expression data (3, 4) to discover in an unbiased manner the most striking transcriptional features of trastuzumab treatment. We found that the primary tumors of patients treated with trastuzumab express significantly higher levels of CD34 than do those of patients not treated with trastuzumab. CD34 is a differentially expressed gene that distinguishes breast cancer from the normal breast (5), and these data demonstrate that trastuzumab enhances, not reverses, a marker of the breast tumor.