Genetic Mutations Associated with Hormone-Positive Breast Cancer in Ethiopian Women

In Ethiopia, a breast cancer diagnosis is associated with a prognosis significantly worse than that of Europe and the US. Further, patients presenting with breast cancer in Ethiopia are far younger, on average, and patients are typically diagnosed at very late stages, relative to breast cancer patients of European descent. Emerging data suggest that a large proportion of Ethiopian patients have hormone-positive (ER +) breast cancer. This is surprising given 1) the aggressive nature of the disease, 2) that African Americans with breast cancer frequently have triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), and 3) these patients typically receive chemotherapy, not hormone-targeting drugs. To further examine the similarity of Ethiopian breast tumors to those of African Americans or of those of European descent, we sequenced matched normal and tumor tissue from Ethiopian patients from a small pilot collection. We identified mutations in 615 genes across all three patients, unique to the tumor tissue. Across this analysis, we found far more mutations shared between Ethiopian patient tissue and White patients (103) than we did comparing to African Americans (3). Several mutations were found in extracellular matrix encoding genes with known roles in tumor cell growth and metastasis. We suggest future mechanistic studies on this disease focus on these genes first, toward finding new treatment strategies for breast cancer patients in Ethiopia.