Clinical, pathological and molecular characterization of invasive lobular carcinoma (ILC)

Invasive Lobular Carcinoma (ILC) is the second most common histological subtype of breast cancer (BC) and accounts for up to 15% of all BC. Compared to the most common subtype Invasive Ductal Carcinoma (IDC), ILC differs not only in the clinical presentation of the disease, but also at the histological, morphological, genomic, transcriptomic and immune level. Despite these differences, in clinical practice, the histological subtype is rarely considered when making treatment decisions and only limited information is available on treatment efficacy of novel breast cancer treatments for ILC. In this project, we set up a systematic review to analyze the degree of underdocumentation on ILC in clinical trials. Furthermore the prognostic and predective factors of breast cancer are understudied in ILC. Therefor a multicentric retrospective analyses was set up to analyze the association between different clinicopathological factors and ILC features and outcome.Finally, ILC tends to have a peculiar metastatic spread with ILC dissemination to the gastrointestinal tract, peritoneum and reproductive organs. ILC progression is being investigated by performing an in-depth molecular characterization of tumor samples obtained through a single centre research autopsy program. Altogether, we believe that this thesis may lead to new insights into personalized treatment strategies for patients with ILC.