<i>ERBB2</i> kinase domain mutation in a gastric cancer metastasis

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

<P>ERBB2 is a member of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) family. Recent studies revealed that the kinase domain of the <I>ERBB2</I> gene was mutated in human cancers, including gastric cancer. Despite the importance of cancer metastasis in the pathogenesis of cancers, data on the <I>ERBB2</I> kinase domain mutation in cancer metastasis are lacking. In this study, to explore the possibility that <I>ERBB2</I> mutation is involved in the metastasis mechanism, we analyzed the kinase domain of <I>ERBB2</I> for the detection of somatic mutations in 58 gastric adenocarcinomas with lymph node metastasis. We found one <I>ERBB2</I> mutation, which was detected in the lymph node metastasis, but not in the primary tumor of the same patient. The <I>ERBB2</I> mutation was a missense mutation which substituted an amino acid in exon 21 (V832I). We simultaneously analyzed the somatic mutations of <I>EGFR</I>, <I>K-RAS</I>, <I>PIK3CA</I> and <I>BRAF</I> genes in the sample with the <I>ERBB2</I> mutation, and found that this metastatic carcinoma did not harbor any of the mutations. Our data suggest that <I>ERBB2</I> kinase domain mutation occasionally occurs in metastatic gastric carcinoma and might play a role in the metastatic process of some gastric carcinomas.</P>