Metastatic profiling of HER2-positive breast cancer cell lines in xenograft models.

Most studies on breast cancer metastasis have been performed using triple-negative breast cancer cells; thus, subtype-dependent metastatic ability of breast cancer is poorly understood. In this research, we performed intravenous injection (IVI) and intra-caudal arterial injections using nine human epidermal growth factor receptor-2 (HER2)-positive breast cancer cell lines for evaluating their metastatic abilities. Our results showed that MDA-MB-453, UACC-893, and HCC-202 had strong bone metastatic abilities, whereas HCC-2218 and HCC-1419 did not show bone metastasis. HER2-positive cell lines could hardly metastasize to the lung through IVI. From the genomic analysis, gene signatures were extracted according to the breast cancer subtypes and their metastatic preferences. The UACC-893 cell line was identified as a useful model for the metastasis study of HER2-positive breast cancer. Combined with our previous result on brain metastasis ability, we provide a characteristic metastasis profile of HER2-positive breast cancer cell lines in this study.