PAM50 assay and the three-gene model for identifying the major and clinically relevant molecular subtypes of breast cancer

It has recently been proposed that a three-gene model (SCMGENE) that measures ESR1, ERBB2, and AURKA identifies the major breast cancer intrinsic subtypes and provides robust discrimination for clinical use in a manner very similar to a 50-gene subtype predictor (PAM50). However, the clinical relevance of both predictors was not fully explored, which is needed given that a ~30 % discordance rate between these two predictors was observed. Using the same datasets and subtype calls provided by Haibe-Kains and colleagues, we compared the SCMGENE assignments and the research-based PAM50 assignments in terms of their ability to (1) predict patient outcome, (2) predict pathological complete response (pCR) after anthracycline/taxane-based chemotherapy, and (3) capture the main biological diversity displayed by all genes from a microarray. In terms of survival predictions, both assays provided independent prognostic information from each other and beyond the data provided by standard clinical–pathological variables; however, the amount of prognostic information was found to be significantly greater with the PAM50 assay than the SCMGENE assay. In terms of chemotherapy response, the PAM50 assay was the only assay to provide independent predictive information of pCR in multivariate models. Finally, compared to the SCMGENE predictor, the PAM50 assay explained a significantly greater amount of gene expression diversity as captured by the two main principal components of the breast cancer microarray data. Our results show that classification of the major and clinically relevant molecular subtypes of breast cancer are best captured using larger gene panels.