Metaplastic breast carcinoma (MBC) is a rare and aggressive histologic type of breast cancer, preferentially displaying a triple-negative phenotype (i.e. lacking estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor and HER2 expression). We sought to define the transcriptomic heterogeneity of MBCs on the basis of current gene expression microarray-based classifiers and to determine whether MBCs display gene copy number profiles consistent with those of BRCA1-associated breast cancers.