Introduction
early-stage operable primary breast cancer, TNBC, triple-negative breast cancer, tumor
TUMOR, TRIPLE-NEGATIVE BREAST CANCER, TRIPLE NEGATIVE BREAST CANCER
Neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) is the preferred treatment strategy for patients with early-stage operable primary breast cancer of biologically aggressive subtypes, such as triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC)Furthermore, although anthracyclines and taxanes are now widely accepted as standard of care chemotherapy in TNBC, at the time the Neoadjuvant Carboplatin in Triple Negative Breast Cancer (NACATRINE), a phase II randomized clinical trial that investigated the addition of carboplatin to standard NAC in TNBC, was conceived, there were significant uncertainties about the role of this agent in this settingFor therapies that add risks and/or side effects and have uncertain benefits to patients, translational research studies are particularly important because they may allow the identification of subgroups of patients who derive greater or lower benefits from these treatments. Despite decades of investigation, predictive markers of response to chemotherapeutic agents in several tumor types remain elusiveIn the present study, by applying transcriptomics analyses to pretreatment samples of the NACATRINE trial, we aimed to identify potential biomarkers predictive of pCR in the entire cohort and of the benefits from carboplatin.