Intra-patient and inter-metastasis heterogeneity of HER2-low status in metastatic breast cancer

Introduction: Anti-HER2 antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) have shown im-portant efficacy in HER2-low metastatic breast cancer (mBC). Criteria for receiving ADCs are based on a single assay on the primary tumour or a small metastatic biopsy. We assessed the intra-patient inter-metastasis heterogeneity of HER2-low status in HER2-nega-tive mBC.Patients and Methods: We included samples of 10 patients (7 ER-positive and 3 ER -ne-gative) donated in the context of our post-mortem tissue donation program UPTIDER. Excisional post-mortem biopsies of 257 metastases and 8 breast tumours underwent central HER2 immunohistochemistry (IHC), alongside 41 pre-mortem primary or meta-static samples. They were classified as HER2-zero, HER2-low (HER2-1+ or HER2-2+, in situ hybridisation [ISH] negative) or HER2-positive (HER2-3+ or HER2-2+, ISH- positive) following ASCO/CAP guidelines 2018. HER2-zero was further subdivided into HER2-undetected (no staining) and HER2-ultralow (faint staining in & LE;10% of tumour cells).Results: Median post-mortem interval was 2.5 h. In 8/10 patients, HER2-low and HER2-zero metastases co-existed, with the proportion of HER2-low lesions ranging from 5% to 89%. A total of 32% of metastases currently classified as HER2-zero were HER2-ultralow. Intra-organ inter-metastasis heterogeneity of HER2-scores was observed in the liver in 3/6 patients. Patients with primary ER-positive disease had a higher proportion of HER2-low metastases as compared to ER-negative disease (46% versus 8%, respectively). At the metastasis level, higher percentages of ER-expressing cells were observed in HER2-low or-ultralow as com-pared to HER2-undetected metastases.Conclusions: Important intra-patient inter-metastasis heterogeneity of HER2-low status ex-ists. This questions the validity of HER2-low in its current form as a theranostic marker. & COPY; 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).