Hypoxia-Inducible Factor-1 Alpha Expression Is Predictive of Pathological Complete Response in Patients with Breast Cancer Receiving Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy Ramírez Tortosa, César Luis Gálvez Navas, José María Pérez Ramírez, Cristina Quiles Morales, José Luis Jiménez Morales, Alberto Ramírez Tortosa, María Carmen Hypoxia-inducible factor 1 Breast cancer Neoadjuvant chemotherapy Prognostic factor Pathological complete response Supplementary Materials The following supporting information can be downloaded at: https://www.mdpi.com/article/10.3390/cancers14215393/s1, Table S1: Relation between HIF-1α expression and pAKT and pMAPK; Table S2: Logistic regression model as a predictive factor of response to treatment. To demonstrate the value of hypoxia-inducible factor-1α (HIF-1α) in predicting response in patients with breast cancer receiving standard neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC). Methods: Ninety-five women enrolled in two prospective studies underwent biopsies for the histopathological diagnosis of breast carcinoma before receiving NAC, based on anthracyclines and taxanes. For expression of HIF-1α, EGFR, pAKT and pMAPK, tumor samples were analyzed by immunohistochemistry in tissues microarrays. Standard statistical methods (Pearson chi-square test, Fisher exact test, Kruskal–Wallis test, Mann–Whitney test and Kaplan–Meier method) were used to study the association of HIF-1α with tumor response, survival and other clinicopathologic variables/biomarkers. Results: HIF-1α expression was positive in 35 (39.7%) cases and was significantly associated to complete pathological response (pCR) (p = 0.014). HIF-1α expression was correlated positively with tumor grade (p = 0.015) and Ki-67 expression (p = 0.001) and negativity with progesterone receptors (PR) (p = 0.04) and luminal A phenotype expression (p = 0.005). No correlation was found between HIF-1α expression and EGFR, pAKT and pMAPK. In terms of survival, HIF-1α expression was associated with a significantly shorter disease-free survival (p = 0.013), being identified as an independent prognostic factor in multivariate analysis. Conclusions: Overexpression of HIF-1α is a predictor of pCR and shorter DFS; it would be valuable to confirm these results in prospective studies. 2022-12-02T09:07:50Z 2022-12-02T09:07:50Z 2022-11-02 journal article Ramírez-Tortosa, C.L.; Alonso-Calderón, R.; Gálvez-Navas, J.M.; Pérez-Ramírez, C.; Quiles, J.L.; Sánchez-Rovira, P.; Jiménez-Morales, A.; Ramírez-Tortosa, M. Hypoxia-Inducible Factor-1 Alpha Expression Is Predictive of Pathological Complete Response in Patients with Breast Cancer Receiving Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy. Cancers 2022, 14, 5393. [https://doi.org/10.3390/cancers14215393] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/78240 10.3390/cancers14215393 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ open access Atribución 4.0 Internacional MDPI