Background
Pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the USA [
1]. With a 5-year survival rate of only 5 %, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is known for having an extremely poor prognosis [
2]. The most widely studied prognostic factors are related to pathological characteristics of the pancreatic cancer, including differentiation, tumor stage, and metastasis [
3].
The progress we made in the field of gene research can be specifically expressed as a continuous recognition of new biological prognostic factors and provide reference for the development of cancer classification and treatment strategies. The human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) protein, the c-erb gene encoding the epithelial growth factor receptor, has been considered to play an important role in tumorigenesis [
4]. Early studies showed that HER2 is expressed in many tissues including breast, gastric, lung, and ovarian cancer and may promote cell proliferation and facilitate uncontrolled cell growth [
5‐
7]. HER2 expression is observed in up to 30 % of breast cancer with this receptor being recognized as a poor prognostic marker but also a therapeutic target of a herceptin-based therapy used in both the adjuvant and metastatic setting. The patient’s treatment decisions are increasingly dependent on the accurate detection of HER2 expression.
Amplification of HER2 gene and/or overexpression of HER2 protein have been implicated in the development of pancreatic cancer (PC). The reported rates of HER2 overexpression in patients with PC range from 4 to 50 % [
8]. Until now, in patients with pancreatic cancer, whether the amplification of HER2 may be a prognostic factor for survival has been constantly investigated in numerous studies worldwide. However, in contrast to breast cancer, the association between HER2 amplification and the clinicopathological characteristics of PC remains controversial, with some studies suggesting that HER2 amplification is associated with poor prognosis and others showing that it is not an independent prognostic factor of patient outcome [
9,
10]. One important factor contributing to this heterogeneity is that the methodologies for HER2 amplification assessment and the criteria for positivity definition varied a lot in different clinical studies.
In 90 % of pancreatic cancers, HER2 protein overexpression is attributable to gene amplification. The expression of HER2 protein was detected by immunohistochemistry (IHC) in routine practice because of simplicity and low costs. IHC is the most widely used method for the assessment of HER2 expression, which scores the membranous immunostaining of the tumor cells ranging from 0 to 3+. Adopting breast cancer scoring criteria for HER2 expression in PC would lead to many false-positive cases. HER2 gene amplification as detected by fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) may be a reliable predictor of clinical response to treatment of pancreatic cancer [
11,
12]. Therefore, we performed this meta-analysis study to determine the prognostic significance of HER2 amplification based on FISH in patients with pancreatic cancer.
Discussion
During tumorigenesis, HER2 has been identified as an oncogene involved in the regulation of proliferation, invasion, and apoptosis of tumor cells. A recent report showed that about 42 % of HER2-positive staining and 16 % HER2 gene amplification were observed in pancreatic cancer tissue samples [
19]. The expression and amplification of HER2 in various tumor cells not only suggests a poor prognosis but also can be used as an indicator of the corresponding targeted therapy. Preclinical studies showed that the monoclonal antibody trastuzumab can significantly inhibit the growth of pancreatic cancer cell lines and xenograft tumor models [
20‐
22].
Nowadays, IHC is a common method for the determination of HER2 in pancreatic cancer tissues. A major problem with the IHC scoring system for pancreatic cancer is that the morphological and biological characteristics of breast cancer and pancreatic cancer are quiet different. Antigen-retrieval protocols optimized for breast tissue are not necessarily appropriate for pancreas, and some cases did show some membrane labeling in nonmalignant elements, suggesting that the antigen-retrieval process may have been set too high. This may explain that IHC methods have the potential to overestimate HER2-positive status. The other technique is FISH, which is mainly to detect the level of HER2 gene amplification. Precise and accurate detection of HER2 gene expression is crucial in pancreatic cancer to determine the future course of treatment [
15].
In this study, we investigated the relationship between the amplification levels of HER2 and clinicopathological factors by meta-analysis. Dysfunction could potentially occur independently at any level in the manufacture of the HER-2 protein such that overexpression exists on the cell surface without genetic amplification. Translational and transcriptional dysfunction has been implicated in other cancer processes to explain this phenomenon. Therefore, such problems will lead to overtreatment or undertreatment by Herceptin. The accuracy of the copy number and the amplification level of HER2 will be of greater clinical significance for Herceptin therapy. This determines whether the technique is trustable or reliable. In pancreatic cancer, Safran et al. [
23] addressed this issue in a subset of the IHC group (
n = 11), finding only three of eight 2+ tumors had gene amplification and none in three 3+ tumors. The finding in this study was in better agreement with FISH than IHC and supports the idea that FISH displays the functional activity of HER-2 gene expression.
In contrast to previous reports, our results showed that HER2 amplification was not related to poor prognosis of pancreatic cancer. There was no statistically significant relationship between HER2 amplification and clinicopathological variables (gender, age, tumor size, grade of differentiation, T stage, and TNM stage). The reasons resulting in this contrary mainly lie in the different criteria for publication selection and enrollment. This study only enrolled the publications that define HER2 status with FISH method, whereas the previous studies used various methods for HER2 detection and scoring.
The significant variability of HER2 amplification definition makes the results incomparable from one study to another. The sample quality and antibody might be important for the difference in FISH positivity. The prognostic significance changes even in the same population if different criteria are used to distinguish HER2+ and HER2− patients. In this study, all included studies define HER2 status with the same criteria (Her2:cep17 ratio ≥2 as the threshold for amplified), which guarantees the credibility of this study. Hofmann et al. [
24] proposed a modified HER2 scoring system; the definition for HER2 positivity has changed from previous IHC 2+ or 3+ or HER2 amplification to IHC 3+ or IHC 2+ with HER2 amplification. The principle of this method involves IHC test for HER2 first, furthered by FISH for IHC 2+ patients. The American Society of Clinical Oncology/College of American Pathologists had recommended an updated testing criterion to define HER2-positive status for breast cancer in 2013 [
25]. HER2-positive status was defined as follows: there is evidence of protein overexpression (IHC) or gene amplification (HER2 copy number or HER2/CEP17 ratio) by FISH based on counting at least 20 cells within the area. But most reports in our study did not use this criterion; patients received FISH detection directly, so false positive might have existed. Adopting a uniform HER2 amplification definition may be helpful for clinical decision-making in the administration of trastuzumab.
Overexpression of HER2 in breast cancer often indicates a poor prognosis. Different from breast cancer, the role of HER2 as a prognostic factor for pancreatic cancer is still controversial. Saxby et al. [
10] suggested that HER2 overexpression was significantly associated with worse prognosis. Chou et al. [
17] carried a study included 469 pancreatic cancer patients and got the opposite result. However, in most of the literature, there was little correlation between HER2 amplification and poor prognosis for pancreatic cancer. Our results showed that an HER2-amplification status was not related to the prognosis of pancreatic cancer, and it suggested that the HER2 amplification may not act as a prognostic factor for OS in pancreatic cancer.
The prognosis of PC depended on many clinicopathological factors such as tumor size, location, lymph node metastasis, stage, differentiation degree, etc. Of these factors, tumor size, location, lymph node metastasis, and tumor stage seem to be most important. In Chou’s study [
17], they reported that no correlation was found between HER2 amplification and T- or N-factors or TNM stage. Our results also confirmed this. In a series of 30 pancreatic cancers, Saxby et al. [
10] reported a general trend of increased HER2 amplification with tumor stage. However, this study included small number patients. Moreover, we also found that there is not much evidence indicating HER2 amplification as a prognostic factor for worse outcome, this also supports the putative role of HER2 in tumor cell aggressiveness but only as a secondary event. We hope to get more information from a larger sample of studies in order to better understand the accuracy of the treatment in the future.
Using anti-HER2 drugs for HER2-positive patients can greatly improve the efficacy of conventional chemotherapy. Harder et al. [
26] carried a phase II trial to assess the efficacy and safety of Xeloda and trastuzumab as first-line therapy in patients with HER2-positive metastatic pancreatic cancer. The results showed that the treatment was well-tolerated; however, PFS and OS had no obvious advantages compared with standard chemotherapy. Further research is required to explain the impact of anti-HER2 therapy on the prognosis of metastatic pancreatic cancer.
There are some limitations of this study that should be considered. Firstly, the studies data included in this meta-analysis were all retrospective and nonrandomized ones, so the results may be limited for they are not the highest quality of evidence. Secondly, we cannot rule out that publication bias or heterogeneity between studies may lead to an underestimate of the correlations. Thirdly, we could not get enough data for subgroup analysis such as tumor stage, age, and gender from most of the included studies. Therefore, the prognostic value of HER2 amplification is not clear in subtypes of pancreatic cancer. The software GetData Graph Digitizer was applied to digitize and extract the data from the Kaplan-Meier curve in some articles. This may have led to bias and might not allow a reliable conclusion. Fourthly, the study was restricted to studies published as a full-text article in English, which may lead to bias. Lastly, most reports in this study used FISH detection directly, so we did not know the results of the concordance between IHC and FISH and false positive might have existed.
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Authors’ contributions
ZLZ conceived and designed the analysis. LXP, ZH, and GJC analyzed the data. LXP and ZH wrote the paper. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.