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Special Issue Editors

Dr. Alberto Zambelli

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor

Medical Oncology Unit, Azienda Ospedaliera Papa Giovanni XXIII, 24127 Bergamo, Italy
Interests: breast cancer; breast cancer translational research; prognostic and predictive breast cancer biomarkers; breast cancer new drug development
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Dr. Carlo Tondini

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor

Azienda Ospedaliera Papa Giovanni XXIII, Bergamo, Italy
Interests: breast cancer; breast cancer translational research; breast cancer adjuvant treatment; breast cancer new drug development

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In the last two decades, a new conceptual approach to breast cancer (BC) has emerged, providing a better understanding of the biology of the disease. With the advent of genomic analyses, it has become evident that BC is not a single type of tumor, but a group of different diseases with distinct molecular properties, eventually defined by the use of multigene assays (MGAs). Each of these different molecular properties identify different BC subtypes that tend to respond differently to anticancer therapy. This has fueled the promise of MGAs to provide detailed and specific molecular information, which will ultimately lead to individualized and more precise BC treatment, along with a more accurate BC classification and staging.

Actually, MGAs may contribute to optimizing treatment decision-making in early-stage breast cancer (eBC), enabling selective use of adjuvant chemotherapy more effectively than can be achieved with conventional clinicopathologic parameters. Different types of MGAs are now available in the daily clinical practice, including Oncotype DX®, MammaPrint®, Endopredict®, Prosigna®, and the Breast Cancer Index® (BCI). The use of MGAs is supported by evidence from retrospective and prospective studies, but controversies still remain in specific and comparative clinical utility analyses of different MGAs in eBC.

This Special Issue focuses on the role and impact of the different MGAs in eBC and their implications for classification, staging, prognosis, and treatment. We cordially invite authors in the field to submit original research or review articles pertaining to this important and progressing field of biomedicine.

Dr. Alberto Zambelli
Dr. Carlo Tondini
Guest Editors

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Keywords

early-stage breast cancer
breast cancer molecular subtypes
multigene assays
breast cancer prognosis
breast cancer staging
adjuvant chemotherapy

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

Jump to: Review

20 pages, 5558 KiB

Open AccessArticle

HOXB7 Overexpression Leads Triple-Negative Breast Cancer Cells to a Less Aggressive Phenotype

by Simone Aparecida de Bessa Garcia, Mafalda Araújo, Tiago Pereira and Renata Freitas

Biomedicines 2021, 9(5), 515; https://doi.org/10.3390/biomedicines9050515 - 05 May 2021

Cited by 6 | Viewed by 2278

Abstract

HOX genes appear to play a role in breast cancer progression in a molecular subtype-dependent way. The altered expression of HOXB7, for example, was reported to promote breast cancer progression in specific subtypes. Here we induced HOXB7 overexpression in MDA-MB-231 cells, a cellular model of the Triple-Negative breast cancer molecular subtype, and evaluated the phenotypic changes in cell viability, morphogenesis, migration, invasion, and colony formation. During the phenotypic characterization of the HOXB7-overexpressing cells, we consistently found less aggressive behavior represented by lower cell viability, inhibition of cell migration, invasion, and attachment-independent colony formation capacities added to the more compact and organized spheroid growth in 3D cultures. We then evaluated the expression of putative downstream targets and their direct binding to HOXB7 comparing ChIP-qPCR data generated from HOXB7-overexpressing cells and controls. In the manipulated cells, we found enriched biding of HOXB7 to CTNNB1, EGFR, FGF2, CDH1, DNMT3B, TGFB2, and COMMD7. Taken together, these results highlight the plasticity of the HOXB7 function in breast cancer, according to the cellular genetic background and expression levels, and provide evidence that in Triple-Negative breast cancer cells, HOXB7 overexpression has the potential to promote less aggressive phenotypes. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Multigene Assays in Early Breast Cancer: Implications for Classification, Staging, Prognosis and Treatment)

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Review

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14 pages, 826 KiB

Open AccessReview

Gene Expression Profiling in Early Breast Cancer—Patient Stratification Based on Molecular and Tumor Microenvironment Features

by Gyöngyi Munkácsy, Libero Santarpia and Balázs Győrffy

Biomedicines 2022, 10(2), 248; https://doi.org/10.3390/biomedicines10020248 - 24 Jan 2022

Cited by 11 | Viewed by 5018

Abstract

Patients with early-stage hormone receptor-positive, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-negative (HER2−) breast cancer (BC) are typically treated with surgery, followed by adjuvant systemic endocrine therapy with or without adjuvant chemotherapy and radiation therapy. Current guidelines regarding the use of adjuvant systemic therapy depend on clinical and pathological factors, such as the morphological assessment of tumor subtype; histological grade; tumor size; lymphovascular invasion; and lymph node status combined with estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor, and HER2 biomarker profiles assessed using immunohistochemistry and in situ hybridization. Additionally, the prognostic and predictive value of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes and their composition is emerging as a key marker in triple negative (TNBC) and HER2-enriched molecular breast tumor subtypes. However, all these factors do not necessarily reflect the molecular heterogeneity and complexity of breast cancer. In the last two decades, gene expression signatures or profiling (GEP) tests have been developed to predict the risk of disease recurrence and estimate the potential benefit of receiving adjuvant systemic chemotherapy in patients with luminal breast cancer. GEPs have been utilized to help physicians to refine decision-making process, complementing clinicopathological parameters, and can now be used to classify the risk of recurrence and tailoring personalized treatments. Several clinical trials using GEPs validate the increasing value of such assays in different clinical settings, addressing relevant clinical endpoints. Finally, the recent approval of immune checkpoint inhibitors in TNBC and the increasing use of immunotherapy in different molecular BC populations highlight the opportunity to refine current GEPs by including a variety of immune-related genes that may help to improve predicting drug response and finetune prognosis. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Multigene Assays in Early Breast Cancer: Implications for Classification, Staging, Prognosis and Treatment)

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