New trends in molecular biomarker discovery for breast cancer

Abstract

Breast cancer is one of the most common and leading causes of cancer death in women. Early diagnosis, selection of appropriate therapeutic strategies, and efficient follow-up play an important role in reducing mortality. Recently, HER-2/neu in breast cancer has been routinely used to guide treatment of using Trastuzumab in less than 25-30% of patients. More new biomarkers will be still expected in the future to tailor treatments. However, there are still many obstacles in developing clinically useful biomarker tests for clinical practice. A lack of specificity of tumor markers and lack of sensitivity of testing systems have been noticed, which limit their clinical use. Finding biomarkers for breast cancer could allow physicians to identify individuals who are susceptible to certain types and stages of cancer to tailor preventive and therapeutic modalities based on the genotype and phenotype information. These biomarkers should be cancer specific, and sensitively detectable in a wide range of specimen(s) containing cancer-derived materials, including body fluids (plasma, serum, urine, saliva, etc.), tissues, and cell lines. This review highlights the new trends and approaches in breast cancer biomarker discovery, which could be potentially used for early diagnosis, development of new therapeutic approaches, and follow-up of patients.