RATIONALE: Drugs used in chemotherapy, such as epirubicin, work in different ways to stop the growth of tumor cells, either by killing the cells or by stopping them from dividing. Giving epirubicin before surgery may make the tumor smaller and reduce the amount of normal tissue that needs to be removed.

PURPOSE: This phase II trial is studying how well epirubicin works in treating women who are undergoing surgery for stage I, stage II, or stage III breast cancer.

OBJECTIVES:

Primary

• Determine the complete pathological and clinical response rate in women undergoing surgery for resectable stage I-III breast cancer treated with neoadjuvant dose-intensified epirubicin hydrochloride.

Secondary

• Determine the toxicity of this regimen in these patients.
• Determine the predictive value of HER2 gene amplification and topoisomerase II-alpha gene amplification or deletion for disease progression and pathological and clinical complete response in patients treated with this regimen.
• Correlate gene expression profiles with pathologic complete response, clinical complete response, less than complete response, and disease progression in patients treated with this regimen.

OUTLINE: Patients receive epirubicin hydrochloride IV on day 1 and pegfilgrastim subcutaneously on day 2. Treatment repeats every 14 days for 4 courses in the absence of disease progression or unacceptable toxicity. Four weeks later, patients undergo partial mastectomy or simple mastectomy plus an axillary staging procedure.

After completion of study treatment, patients are followed periodically.

PROJECTED ACCRUAL: A total of 30 patients will be accrued for this study.

DISEASE CHARACTERISTICS:

• Histologically confirmed invasive breast cancer

  • Stage I, II, or III disease (T1, T2, or T4; N0-2; M0)

    • Resectable disease

• Unidimensionally measurable disease

  • Primary tumor ≥ 2 cm

• No known distant metastases

• Hormone receptor status:

  • Not specified

PATIENT CHARACTERISTICS:

Sex

• Female

Menopausal status

• Not specified

Performance status

• ECOG 0-2

Life expectancy

• Not specified

Hematopoietic

• WBC ≥ 3,500/mm^3
• Hemoglobin ≥ 8 g/dL
• Platelet count ≥ 100,000/mm^3
• No known untreated bleeding diathesis

Hepatic

• AST ≤ 2 times upper limits of normal
• Bilirubin ≤ 1.5 mg/dL

Renal

• Creatinine ≤ 1.5 mg/dL OR
• Creatinine clearance ≥ 60 mL/min

Cardiovascular

• LVEF ≥ 50% on echocardiogram, MUGA, or cardiac catheterization

Other

• Not pregnant or breastfeeding
• Fertile patients must use effective contraception
• Negative pregnancy test
• No concurrent illness that would preclude study treatment
• No known hypersensitivity to Escherichia coli-derived proteins, pegfilgrastim, filgrastim (G-CSF), or any other component of these products

PRIOR CONCURRENT THERAPY: Not specified