PEG3 mutation is associated with elevated tumor mutation burden and poor prognosis in breast cancer

Breast cancer is the second most common malignancy in women and considered as a severe health burden. PEG3 mutations have been observed in several cancers. However, the associations of PEG3 mutation with tumor mutation burden (TMB) and prognosis in breast cancer have not been investigated.

In our study, the somatic mutation data of 986 breast cancer patients from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) were analyzed.

It showed that PEG3 had a relatively high mutation rate (2%). After calculated the TMB in PEG3 mutant and PEG3 wild-type groups, we found the TMB value was significantly higher in PEG3 mutant samples than that in PEG3 wild-type samples (P = 5.6e-07), which was independent of the confounding factors including age, stage, mutations of BRCA1, BRCA2 and POLE (odd ratio, 0.45; 95% CI, 0.20-0.98; P=0.044). Survival analysis revealed that PEG3 mutant samples had inferior survival outcome compared with the PEG3 wild-type samples after adjusted for the confounding factors above (hazard ratio, 0.27; 95% CI: 0.12-0.57; P<0.001).

These results illustrated that PEG3 mutation was associated with high TMB and inferior prognosis, suggesting PEG3 mutation might play a guiding role in prognosis prediction and immunotherapy selection in breast cancer.