Mutated pathways as a guide to adjuvant therapy treatments for breast cancer

Adjuvant therapy following breast cancer surgery generally consists of either a course of chemotherapy if the cancer lacks hormone receptors, or a course of hormonal therapy, otherwise. Here we report a correlation between adjuvant strategy, and mutated pathway patterns. In particular we find that for breast cancer patients, pathways enriched in non-synonymous mutations in the chemotherapy group, are distinct from those of the hormonal therapy group. We apply a recently developed method that identifies collaborative pathway groups for hormone and chemotherapy patients. A collaborative group of pathways is one in which each member is altered in the same--generally large--number of samples. In particular we find the following: (i) A chemotherapy group consisting of 3 pathways and a hormone therapy group consisting of 20, the members of the two groups being mutually exclusive. (ii) Each group is highly enriched in breast cancer drivers. (iii) The pathway groups are correlates of subtype-based therapeutic recommendations. These results suggest that patient profiling using these pathway groups can potentially enable the development of personalized treatment plans that may be more accurate and specific than those currently available.

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