High CYCLON expression was not associated to poor survival in CHOP-treated patients of either molecular subtype (Supporting Information Fig S2C).
The molecular clinical subtype information for the patients from whom the basal and luminal breast cancer xenograft models were derived indicate that the basal xenograft is HER2-, ER- and PR-, whereas the luminal xenograft (luminal A subtype) is HER2-, ER+ and PR+ [ 29].
However, several groups have reported varying levels of concordance between assignments of subtype by IHC and gene expression array criteria, and most suggest that the information provided by the molecular subtypes expands the information provided by classical clinicopathologic markers.
Comparison of study individuals (n = 663), with those excluded because of missing information for molecular subtype (n = 409) showed that these groups did not differ in any of the clinical characteristics under study (P > 0.05, data not shown).
The availability of centrally collated and harmonized information on molecular subtype, clinical treatment, and follow up in BCAC allowed us to assess potential differential SNP associations according to chemotherapy and also according to ER status.
While this was certainly a simple oversight on the part of the original authors, there was no information on molecular subtype for the samples and we only discovered it by doing a 'forensic' analysis using other published signatures to infer subtype.
The aims of this study were to discover whether reclassification of breast tumours into molecular subtypes provides more information regarding outcome compared to conventional histopathological grading and to study breast cancer-specific survival (BCSS) for molecular subtypes over time.
Each of these approaches provides prognostic information through a molecular subtype classification of breast cancer, but there is less evidence as to how these approaches compare or add to the use of conventional prognostic factors [ 7- 14, 17, 18] 18].
Despite more than 100 local recurrences and almost 70 invasive events we found very sparse prognostic information using the intrinsic surrogate molecular subtype classification.
