HER2 Amplification Has no Prognostic Value in Sporadic and Hereditary Ovarian Tumours

HER2 amplification is a well-known phenomenon in breast tumours and its clinical importance is established in these malignancies. It was observed that patients with HER2-amplification in breast cancer tissue showed shorter disease-free time intervals and they benefit from therapy with the anti-Her-2/neu antibody, Herceptin [6,19,25].It was suggested that the presence of amplification of HER2 is associated with the advanced clinical stage of ovarian cancer and does not occur in borderline and early stage disease [10,29]. Some studies reported a significant difference in overall survival between women with HER2 negative and positive tumours [2,7,22] in contrast to later studies which demonstrated that HER2 over-expression had no relationship with prognosis [3,5,17,21]. At present, there are few published reports of the clinical significance of HER2 amplification, demonstrated by the FISH techniques, in ovarian tumours, and the predictive value of HER2 assessment has not been demonstrated.There is evidence that germline mutations in the BRCA1/2 genes confers increased susceptibility to breast and ovarian cancer. It is suggested that a germ-line mutation in the BRCA1 gene is associated with a significantly lower level of HER2 amplification in breast tumours [1,9,19,25]. Similarly, it was noticed that BRCA-linked ovarian carcinomas and serous carcinoma of the peritoneum seemed to develop through a unique pathway of tumorigenesis that does not involve mutation in K-RAS or HER2 and C-MYC amplification [20,24]. Some authors, however, did not notice differences in HER2 expression between BRCA-linked ovarian cancer carriers and ovarian cancer as control [15].The aim of the study was to compare the frequency of HER2 amplification in hereditary and sporadic ovarian tumours and to estimate the influence of this gene alteration on clinical outcome in cancer patients.In the present study we analysed 53 ovarian tumour tissue sections: 20 from BRCA mutation carriers and 33 from non-