All but one of the surgical samples were obtained from chemotherapy-naive patients, and the markers for subtyping were validated by pathological examination as ER-positive (BC01 and BC02; luminal A), ER/HER2-positive (BC03; luminal B), HER2-positive (BC04, BC05 and BC06; HER2) and triple-negative (BC07–BC11; TNBC) invasive ductal carcinoma (Supplementary Table 1). The gene discussed is ERBB2; the disease is invasive ductal breast carcinoma.