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Purpose: The clinical relevancy of the 7-subtype classification of triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) reported by Lehmann and colleagues is unknown. We investigated the clinical relevancy of TNBC heterogeneity by determining pathologic complete response (pCR) rates after neoadjuvant chemotherapy, based on TNBC subtypes.

Experimental Design: We revalidated the Lehmann and colleagues experiments using Affymetrix CEL files from public datasets. We applied these methods to 146 patients with TNBC with gene expression microarrays obtained from June 2000 to March 2010 at our institution. Of those, 130 had received standard neoadjuvant chemotherapy and had evaluable pathologic response data. We classified the TNBC samples by subtype and then correlated subtype and pCR status using Fisher exact test and a logistic regression model. We also assessed survival and …