Predicting resistance to endocrine therapy in breast cancer: It's time for epigenetic biomarkers (Review)

Abstract

Notwithstanding the marked progress in breast cancer (BC) management, it still constitutes the most common malignancy in women and a major cause of morbidity and mortality, thus remaining a major health issue worldwide. Most BC cases are hormone receptor (HR) positive (luminal A or B molecular subtypes) and endocrine treatment (ET) is an important therapeutic modality at all disease stages. Nevertheless, despite substantial improvements in BC patient outcome, effectiveness of ET is limited, as up to 40% of patients eventually relapse or progress and endocrine resistant BC has a less favorable prognosis and constitutes a therapeutic challenge. The biological mechanisms underlying endocrine resistance are, however, still poorly understood. In this review, we focused on data regarding the main epigenetic mechanisms associated with the development of endocrine treated-resistant BC described so far, including alterations in DNA methylation, non-coding RNAs, chromatin remodeling, post-translational histone modifications and histone variants. Notably, specific epigenetic alterations have been characterized in this subset of breast tumors and may be of clinical value for individualized patient management in the future. Contents 1. Introduction 2. Evidence acquisition 3. Conclusion

Ectodermal‐neural cortex 1 as a novel biomarker predicts poor prognosis and induces metastasis in breast cancer by promoting Wnt/β‐catenin pathway

“…However, the incidence and the mortality of this disease are still increasing due to the lack of access to advanced diagnosis and therapy in developing areas 1,5 . It is considered incurable with the currently available therapies on metastatic breast cancer 6 . In addition, the prognosis and survival rate of metastatic breast cancer patients are poor.…”

“…1,5 It is considered incurable with the currently available therapies on metastatic breast cancer. 6 In addition, the prognosis and survival rate of metastatic breast cancer patients are poor. Based on the published data, long-term survivors take <5% part among these patients.…”

DNAJB4 identified as a potential breast cancer marker: evidence from bioinformatics analysis and basic experiments

“…Besides, the morbidity and mortality continue to rise and the age of patients' trend to become younger and younger (2,42). BC has the common characteristics of most solid tumors, that is, abnormal genetic and epigenetic changes in cancer occurrence and development (43)(44)(45). The concept of molecular subtypes of BC was put forward by Perou's team (46) in 2000, and it is pointed out that patients with different molecular types of BC have different clinical characteristics and prognosis.…”

Epigenetic Dysregulation at the Crossroad of Women’s Cancer

“…Because of signaling-dependent nature of epigenetic PTMs in a given histone, non-histone, coregulator, or mRNA, epigenetics modifications are amicable to potentially correctable therapeutic manipulations for modifying the resulting phenotype. Because epigenetic regulation of breast cancer has been widely covered by several, excellent recent reviews [48,49,50,51,52,53,54], here we will focus on DNA-demethylation after a brief introduction of CpG methylation.…”