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Somatic Mutations of ERBB2 Kinase Domain in Gastric, Colorectal, and Breast Carcinomas

Authors' Affiliations: Departments of ¹ Pathology, ² General Surgery, and ³ Thoracic Surgery, College of Medicine, The Catholic University of Korea, and ⁴ Department of Pathology, Inje University Sanggye Paik Hospital, Seoul, Korea

Requests for reprints: Sug Hyung Lee, Department of Pathology, College of Medicine, The Catholic University of Korea, 505 Banpo-dong, Socho-gu, Seoul 137-701, Korea. Phone: 82-2-590-1188; Fax: 82-2-537-6586; E-mail: suhulee{at}catholic.ac.kr.

Purpose: Recent reports revealed that the kinase domain of the ERBB2 gene is somatically mutated in lung adenocarcinoma, suggesting the mutated ERBB2 gene as an oncogene in human cancers. However, because previous reports focused the mutational search of ERBB2 primarily on lung cancers, the data on ERBB2 mutations in other types of human cancers have been largely unknown.

Experimental Design: Here, we did a mutational analysis of the ERBB2 kinase domain by PCR single-strand conformational polymorphism assay in gastric, colorectal, and breast carcinoma tissues.

Results: We detected the ERBB2 kinase domain mutations in 9 of 180 gastric carcinomas (5.0%), in 3 of 104 colorectal carcinomas (2.9%), and in 4 of 94 breast carcinomas (4.3%). All of the detected ERBB2 mutations except for one in-frame deletion mutation were missense mutations. Of the 16 ERBB2 mutations detected, 4 affected Val⁷⁷⁷ in the exon 20 site, and 3 affected Leu⁷⁵⁵ in the exon 19 site. We simultaneously analyzed the somatic mutations of EGFR, K-RAS, PIK3CA, and BRAF genes in the 16 samples with ERBB2 mutations, and found that all of the 3 colorectal carcinoma samples with ERBB2 mutations harbored K-RAS mutations.

Conclusion: This study showed that in addition to lung adenocarcinomas, ERBB2 kinase domain mutation occurs in other common human cancers such as gastric, breast, and colorectal cancers, and suggested that alterations of ERBB2-mediated signaling pathway by ERBB2 mutations alone or together with K-RAS mutations may contribute to the development of human cancers.

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