Exome sequencing of contralateral breast cancer identifies metastatic disease

Women with contralateral breast cancer (CBC) have significantly worse prognosis compared to women with unilateral cancer. A possible explanation of the poor prognosis of patients with CBC is that in a subset of patients, the second cancer is not a new primary tumor but a metastasis of the first cancer that has potentially obtained aggressive characteristics through selection of treatment. Exome and whole-genome sequencing of solid tumors has previously been used to investigate the clonal relationship between primary tumors and metastases in several diseases. In order to assess the relationship between the first and the second cancer, we performed exome sequencing to identify somatic mutations in both first and second cancers, and compared paired normal tissue of 25 patients with metachronous CBC. For three patients, we identified shared somatic mutations indicating a common clonal origin thereby demonstrating that the second tumor is a metastasis of the first cancer, rather than a new primary cancer. Accordingly, these patients all developed distant metastasis within 3 years of the second diagnosis, compared with 7 out of 22 patients with non-shared somatic profiles. Genomic profiling of both tumors help the clinicians distinguish between true CBCs and subsequent metastases.