Analysis of Pre- and Posttreatment Tissues from the SWOG S0800 Trial Reveals an Effect of Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy on the Breast Cancer Genome

Purpose: We performed whole-exome sequencing (WES) of pre- and posttreatment cancer tissues to assess the somatic mutation landscape of tumors before and after neoadjuvant taxane and anthracycline chemotherapy with or without bevacizumab. Experimental Design: Twenty-nine pretreatment biopsies from the SWOG S0800 trial were subjected to WES to identify mutational patterns associated with response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Nine matching samples with residual cancer after therapy were also analyzed to assess changes in mutational patterns in response to therapy. Results: In pretreatment samples, a higher proportion of mutation signature 3, a BRCA-mediated DNA repair deficiency mutational signature, was associated with higher rate of pathologic complete response (pCR; median signature weight 24%, range 0%-38% in pCR vs. median weight 0%, range 0%-19% in residual disease, Wilcoxon rank sum, Bonferroni P = 0.007). We found no biological pathway level mutations associated with pCR or enriched in posttreatment samples. We observed statistically significant enrichment of high functional impact mutations in the "E2F targets" and "G2-M checkpoint" pathways in residual cancer samples implicating these pathways in resistance to therapy and a significant depletion of mutations in the "myogenesis pathway" suggesting the cells harboring these variants were effectively eradicated by therapy. Conclusions: These results suggest that genomic disturbances in BRCA-related DNA repair mechanisms, reflected by a dominant mutational signature 3, confer increased chemotherapy sensitivity. Cancers that survive neoadjuvant chemotherapy frequently have alterations in cell-cycle-regulating genes but different genes of the same pathways are affected in different patients.