BACKGROUND

Inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) is a rare and poorly characterized type of breast cancer with an aggressive clinical presentation. The biological mechanisms driving the IBC phenotype are relatively undefined-partially due to a lack of comprehensive, large-scale genomic studies and limited clinical cohorts.

PATIENTS AND METHODS

A retrospective analysis of 2457 patients with metastatic breast cancer who underwent targeted tumor-only DNA-sequencing was performed at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Clinicopathologic, single nucleotide variant (SNV), copy number variant (CNV) and tumor mutational burden (TMB) comparisons were made between clinically confirmed IBC cases within a dedicated IBC center versus non-IBC cases.

RESULTS

Clinicopathologic differences between IBC and non-IBC cases were consistent with prior reports-including IBC being associated with younger age at diagnosis, higher grade, and enrichment with hormone receptor (HR)-negative and HER2-positive tumors. The most frequent somatic alterations in IBC involved (72%), (32%), (24%), (12%), (9%), (8%) and (8%). A multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed a significant enrichment in SNVs in IBC; particularly in HER2-positive and HR-positive disease which was associated with worse outcomes. Tumor mutational burden (TMB) did not differ substantially between IBC and non-IBC cases and a pathway analysis revealed an enrichment in NOTCH pathway alterations in HER2-positive disease.

CONCLUSION

Taken together, this study provides a comprehensive, clinically informed landscape of somatic alterations in a large cohort of patients with IBC. Our data support higher frequency of mutations and a potential enrichment in NOTCH pathway activation-but overall; a lack of major genomic differences. These results both reinforce the importance of alterations in IBC pathogenesis as well as their influence on clinical outcomes; but also suggest additional analyses beyond somatic DNA-level changes are warranted.