Primary Tumor Epigenetic and Transcriptomic Alterations Associated with Nodal Burden and Metastatic Risk in ER+/HER2− Breast Cancer

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De-escalation of axillary surgery has resulted in the loss of pathologic nodal information, yet the extent of lymph node involvement remains an important determinant of treatment decisions in estrogen receptor-positive (ER+)/HER2− disease. We examined whether primary tumors differed molecularly according to the extent of this regional dissemination. Genome-wide DNA methylation profiling of primary ER+/HER2− tumors from 47 patients with pN1 (n = 29) vs. >pN1 (n = 18) disease showed differences concentrated at promoters of developmental and cell-adhesion genes. By integrating methylomes with transcriptomes from the TCGA-BRCA cohort (n = 148) and clinical outcomes from KM Plotter (RFS, n = 1154; OS, n = 442; DMFS, n = 423), we identified four genes (ARL10, RIC3, CXCL14, KCNH2) showing concordant molecular and clinical associations, from which we derived the Lymph-node Involvement Outcome Numerator (LION) score. Lower LION scores were observed in metastatic lesions from the AURORA US cohort (n = 45). In SCAN-B (n = 3969), lower scores were associated with shorter distant recurrence-free intervals (HR = 0.38; 95% CI 0.23–0.62); this association persisted after adjustment for age, nodal and tumor category but was lost after adjustment for histological grade (HR = 0.83; 95% CI 0.48–1.44), indicating that the score and grade capture overlapping biology. These findings suggest that primary tumors already display coordinated epigenetic and transcriptional alterations associated with the extent of metastatic dissemination.

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