Prognostic impact of phosphorylated HER-2 in HER-2+ primary breast cancer.

Abstract Purpose. Tyrosine 1248 is one of the autophosphorylation sites of human epidermal growth factor receptor (HER)-2. We determined the prognostic value of the expression level of tyrosine 1248–phosphorylated HER-2 (pHER-2) in patients with HER-2+ primary breast cancer using a reverse-phase protein array. Patients and Methods. The optimal cutoff value of pHER-2 for segregating disease-free survival (DFS) was determined by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis. Five-year DFS for pHER-2 expression level was estimated with the Kaplan-Meier method using both derivation (n = 162) and validation (n = 227) cohorts. Results. Of the 162 patients in the derivation cohort, 26 had…