Bevacizumab treatment of patients with breast cancer results in induction of KLF2, KLF4, KLF6 and KLF9.
Bevacizumab (Avastin) is an approved treatment option by the European Medicines Agency (1) for more than a quarter billion women in the European Union, and despite having its indication withdrawn by the Food and Drug Administration in 2011 is still utilized in clinical trials in the United States (2, 3). We mined published microarray data (4) from the PROMIX trial to understand in an unbiased fashion genes most transcriptionally perturbed by bevacizumab administration and how this interacted with a standard anthracycline and taxane chemotherapeutic regimen, epirubicin and docetaxel. We report here the striking induction of four separate KLF transcription factors in the primary tumors of women treated with bevacizumab: KLF2, KLF4, KLF6 and KLF9, two of which have established roles in the generation or maintenance of ground state pluripotency in embryonic stem cells (5, 6).