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Review
. 2015 Sep 15;5(10):2929-43.
eCollection 2015.

Breast cancer intrinsic subtype classification, clinical use and future trends

Xiaofeng Dai  1 , Ting Li  1 , Zhonghu Bai  1 , Yankun Yang  1 , Xiuxia Liu  1 , Jinling Zhan  1 , Bozhi Shi  2
Affiliations
Review

Breast cancer intrinsic subtype classification, clinical use and future trends

Xiaofeng Dai et al. Am J Cancer Res. .

Abstract

Breast cancer is composed of multiple subtypes with distinct morphologies and clinical implications. The advent of microarrays has led to a new paradigm in deciphering breast cancer heterogeneity, based on which the intrinsic subtyping system using prognostic multigene classifiers was developed. Subtypes identified using different gene panels, though overlap to a great extent, do not completely converge, and the avail of new information and perspectives has led to the emergence of novel subtypes, which complicate our understanding towards breast tumor heterogeneity. This review explores and summarizes the existing intrinsic subtypes, patient clinical features and management, commercial signature panels, as well as various information used for tumor classification. Two trends are pointed out in the end on breast cancer subtyping, i.e., either diverging to more refined groups or converging to the major subtypes. This review improves our understandings towards breast cancer intrinsic classification, current status on clinical application, and future trends.

Keywords: Breast cancer; classification; clinical use; gene expression profiling; heterogeneity; intrinsic subtype; signature; trends.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Intrinsic breast tumor subtypes identified according to the example studies listed in the text. Gray blocks show subtypes identified from the study, white blocks are out of the scope of the corresponding study or 0 subtype is found. The value in each block shows the number of subtypes identified for each subtype. The corresponding blocks are unified for the identified group comprising of multiple tumor subtypes. GEP: gene expression profiling. Subtyping using gene expression data. TMA: tissue microarray. Subtyping using protein expression data. PATH: pathway. Subtyping based on pathway. INT: integrative view. Subyping using data integrated from multiple levels.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Patient outcome based on breast tumor intrinsic subtypes.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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