Introduction: HER2-positive breast cancer (BC) is a heterogeneous group of aggressive breast cancers, the prognosis of which has greatly improved since the introduction of treatments targeting HER2. However, these tumors may display intrinsic or acquired resistance to treatment, and classifiers of HER2-positive tumors are required to improve the prediction of prognosis and to develop novel therapeutic interventions.
Methods: We analyzed 2893 primary human breast cancer samples from 21 publicly available datasets and developed a six-metagene signature on a training set of 448 HER2-positive BC.