Available online http://breast-cancer-research.com/content/7/5/R753 ResearchVol 7 No 5 article Open Access Phosphorylation of estrogen receptor α serine 167 is predictive of response to endocrine therapy and increases postrelapse survival in metastatic breast cancer Hiroko Yamashita1, Mariko Nishio2, Shunzo Kobayashi3, Yoshiaki Ando1, Hiroshi Sugiura1, Zhenhuan Zhang2, Maho Hamaguchi1, Keiko Mita1, Yoshitaka Fujii1 and Hirotaka Iwase2 1Oncology and Immunology, Nagoya City University Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Nagoya, Japan 2Oncology and Endocrinology, Nagoya City University Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Nagoya, Japan 3Josai Municipal Hospital of Nagoya, Nagoya, Japan Corresponding author: Hiroko Yamashita,
[email protected] Received: 29 Jan 2005 Revisions requested: 15 Apr 2005 Revisions received: 12 Jun 2005 Accepted: 28 Jun 2005 Published: 27 Jul 2005 Breast Cancer Research 2005, 7:R753-R764 (DOI 10.1186/bcr1285) This article is online at: http://breast-cancer-research.com/content/7/5/R753 © 2005 Yamashita et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Introduction Endocrine therapy is the most important treatment Results Phosphorylation of ER-α Ser118, but not Ser167, was option for women with hormone-receptor-positive breast positively associated with overexpression of HER2, and HER2- cancer. The potential mechanisms for endocrine resistance positive tumors showed resistance to endocrine therapy. The involve estrogen receptor (ER)-coregulatory proteins and present study has shown for the first time that phosphorylation crosstalk between ER and other growth factor signaling of ER-α Ser167, but not Ser118, and expression of PRA and networks.