Implementation of Solid Digital PCR to Support Gold-standard Methods for Evaluation of HER2 Amplification Status: Focus on HER2-low Subtype

Breast Cancer

Breast cancer, HER2, HER2-low, Prognostic-predictive markers, IHC, D-DISH, FISH, solid digital PCR, liquid biopsy

The goal of the retrospective phase of this study is to validate the specificity and the sensitivity of two Real-Time quantitative PCR based techniques in order to support the gold-standard approaches used to evaluate the HER2 gene status in breast cancer. Furthemore, HER2-low patients are enrolled in a prospective phase, both in early stage and in case of recurrence, in order to monitorate HER2 expression levels changes under treatments by using liquid biopsy. The first aim is to be able to distinguish responders vs non-responders earlier than the standard monitoring through tumoral markers and medical examination.

The hypothesis underlying this study is that the use of solid digital PCR technology and the MammaTyper® diagnostic test allows the molecular classification of breast carcinomas to be refined and strengthened from early diagnosis, limiting the bias related to interpretation problems and thus improving the prognostic power of traditional clinical pathological parameters. In fact, the quantitative data of each individual marker, associated with the molecular subtype, provides the oncologist with indispensable prognostic information to define the most appropriate therapeutic approach. Specifically, it is believed that the use of more accurate methods to define HER2 amplification status may help improve diagnostic accuracy, as well as support the choice of optimal therapy, especially for the new HER2-low tumour subtype. It is believed that HER2 levels defined in this way, once correlated with clinical data on survival and response to the therapeutic regimen undertaken by each patient, will allow the detection of significant differences between the HER2-positive, -negative and -equivocal groups, the latter needing to be reclassified as separate entities. A further hypothesis concerns the possible impact that dPCR technology may have in predicting and monitoring response to therapies in a robust, rapid and cost-effective manner. The first endpoint of this study is the identification, by quantitative analysis with dPCR and Mammatyper® performed on paraffin-embedded archival tissue, of HER2-amplified and -unamplified breast carcinomas, the expression levels of which will be compared with those detected by gold-standard methods in order to resolve cases that are difficult to interpret. With the molecular test Mammatyper® it will also be possible to objectively and reproducibly determine the expression of the prognostic-predictive markers ER, PR and Ki67. It is expected that the clinical outcomes of patients will correlate significantly with the expression levels of ER, PR, Ki67 and HER2 estimated in the study. The second endpoint of the study is the identification, by quantitative dPCR analysis performed on paraffin-embedded tissue and liquid biopsy, of HER2-0 and HER2-low enrolled early-stage breast carcinomas undergoing surgical and systemic therapy.It is expected to detect any fluctuations in HER2 expression/amplification due to sensitivity/resistance to systemic therapy or, at follow-up, recurrence.

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