Histopathological Insights into Metastatic Breast Cancer Gained From Rapid Autopsies

The biology of metastatic breast cancer is poorly understood, and its understanding is hampered by limited access to metastatic tissue. Post-mortem tissue donation programs may represent a step forward to circumvent this problem, allowing access to large volumes of samples that would often be inaccessible otherwise. In this context, we have set up the UZ/KU Leuven Program for post-mortem Tissue Donation to Enhance Research (UPTIDER, NCT04531696). In this study, we performed detailed histopathological examination of 662 unique metastases collected during autopsy from the first 20 patients in our UPTIDER program. Tissue procurement was guided by a patient-specific tissue donation plan based on available clinical and imaging data. Central pathology review included revision of the primary tumor and biomarker assessment (estrogen receptor [ER], progesterone receptor [PR], human epidermal growth factor receptor 2, and KI67). Linear mixed quantile regression was used to assess relevant associations. Metastases in bones, liver, pleura, and nonaxillary lymph nodes were present in up to 17 patients. Our major findings include (1) an important clinical underestimation of disease burden in patients with invasive lobular carcinoma; (2) a relatively modest disease burden associated with leptomeningeal metastases; (3) a higher than anticipated loss of predictive biomarkers in metastases from primary ER- positive and/or PR positive tumors (up to 84% and 100% of the patients having at least 1 ER-negative or PR-negative lesion, respectively); (4) a high variability in KI67% between metastases with frequent zonation pattern; and (5) a high frequency of metastases with human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-low or -ultralow status. Despite the challenging setup of UPTIDER, we demonstrated here that the data and observations that emerge from this program have high potential for clinical translatability.