Fatty acid synthase expression and its association with clinico-histopathological features in triple-negative breast cancer

// Ariadna Giró-Perafita 1, * , Ariadna Sarrats 1, * , Ferran Pérez-Bueno 1, 2 , Glòria Oliveras 1, 3 , Maria Buxó 4 , Joan Brunet 1, 3 , Gemma Viñas 1, 3 and Teresa Puig Miquel 1 1 New Terapeutics Targets Laboratory (TargetsLab), Department of Medical Sciences, University of Girona, Girona, Spain 2 Pathology Department, Dr. Josep Trueta Hospital and Catalan Institute of Health (ICS), Girona, Spain 3 Medical Oncology Department, Catalan Institute of Oncology (ICO), Girona, Spain 4 Girona Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBGI), Girona, Spain * These authors have contributed equally to this work Correspondence to: Teresa Puig Miquel, email: teresa.puig@udg.edu Gemma Viñas, email: G.vinyes@iconcologia.net Keywords: EGFR, breast cancer molecular subtypes Received: January 25, 2017 Accepted: May 05, 2017 Published: August 10, 2017 ABSTRACT Triple-Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC) has poor prognosis and no approved targeted therapy. We previously showed that the enzyme fatty acid synthase (FASN) was largely expressed in a small TNBC patients’ cohort and its inhibition synergized with cetuximab in TNBC preclinical mouse models. Here, we evaluated FASN and EGFR expression in a cohort of TNBC patients and we study their prognostic role and their association with clinico-histopathological features, intrinsic TNBC subtypes and survival. FASN, EGFR, CK5/6 and vimentin expression were retrospective evaluated by Immunohistochemistry in 100 primary TNBC tumors. FASN expression was classified into high and low FASN groups. EGFR, CK5/6 and vimentin expression were used in TNBC intrinsic subtypes classification. FASN was expressed in most of the TNBC patients but did not correlate with overall survival or disease-free survival in this cohort. High FASN group was significantly associated with positive node status. FASN expression was significantly higher in Basal-Like patients than in Mesenchymal-Like ones. EGFR expression was positive in 50% of the tumors, and those patients showed poorer DFS. Altogether, our findings provide a rationale for further investigation the prognostic role of FASN and EGFR expression in a larger cohort of TNBC patients.