Deconstructing the molecular portraits of breast cancer

By Aleix Prat, Charles M. Perou. Molecular Oncology, 2010

1,353 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Breast cancer is a heterogeneous disease in terms of histology, therapeutic response, dissemination patterns to distant sites, and patient outcomes. Global gene expression analyses using high‐throughput technologies have helped to explain much of this heterogeneity and provided important new classifications of cancer patients. In the last decade, genomic studies have established five breast cancer intrinsic subtypes (Luminal A, Luminal B, HER2‐enriched, Claudin‐low, Basal‐like) and a Normal Breast‐like group. In this review, we dissect the most recent data on this genomic classification of breast cancer with a special focus on the Claudin‐low subtype, which appears enriched for mesenchymal and stem cell features. In addition, we discuss how the combination of standard clinical‐pathological markers with the information provided by these genomic entities might help further understand the biological complexity of this disease, increase the efficacy of current and novel therapies, and ultimately improve outcomes for breast cancer patients.

Subfields: Cancer Research, Molecular Biology, Oncology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ba04511576c65e04035806018fe587a48a17c223

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cancer Research

1. A. Stanisławek
2. Marcin Czeczelewski
3. Sergiusz Łukasiewicz
4. Robert Sitarz
5. A. Lluch
6. J. Baj
7. Alicja Forma

In Molecular Biology

1. Gordon B. Mills
2. A. Lluch

Citations in the corpus

• Epithelial-mesenchymal transition spectrum quantification and its efficacy in deciphering survival and drug responses of cancer patients (2014, neutral): “This is exemplified by the stratification of breast cancer molecular subtypes (Prat & Perou, 2011), where there is a correlation for better DFS for patients with Epi breast cancers that are of a Basal and Claudin-Low subtypes, but no correlation for other subtypes (Supplementary Fig S7).”
• Molecular biology in breast cancer: intrinsic subtypes and signaling pathways. (2012, background): “These tumors show poor long-term prognosis(45) and an insufficient response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy with intermediate values between basal and luminal tumors.(27)”
• Breast Cancer—Epidemiology, Risk Factors, Classification, Prognostic Markers, and Current Treatment Strategies—An Updated Review (2021, background): “Further studies allowed to divide the Luminal group into two subgroups (Luminal A and B) [138,139].”
• Comprehensive Genomic Analysis Identifies Novel Subtypes and Targets of Triple-negative Breast Cancer (2014, background): “Tumors of the "claudin-low" (CL) subtype (13, 14) have particularly poor prognoses than hormone-sensitive tumors (15).”
• Breast cancer stem cell markers CD44, CD24 and ALDH1: expression distribution within intrinsic molecular subtype (2011, background): “The remaining basal cell lines were positive for both markers, which we believe are cancer cells representative of basal-like tumours with higher levels of differentiation (basal-like A, which maintain an epithelial phenotype), whereas the MDA-MB-231 cells are representative of the most poorly diffe”