Biology and management of inflammatory breast cancer

Inflammatory breast cancer is an aggressive subtype of a locally advanced breast cancer that is thought to account for approximately 1-5% of all newly diagnosed breast cancers diagnosed in the USA. Historically, IBC was considered to be a uniformly fatal disease with less than 5% of patients surviving past 5 years. With the advent of a multidisciplinary approach to management, survival outcomes have improved with 5-year survival rates of over 40% being reported. Research efforts are now focused on trying to better understand the epidemiological and molecular characteristics of this disease to further improve survival. Two genes, Rhoc GTPase and WISP3, have been identified that have been found to be concordantly altered in the majority of inflammatory breast cancer tumors and may serve as potential targets for future therapeutic agents. The purpose of this review is to summarize the latest epidemiological and molecular characteristics of IBC, describe the difficulties encountered in trying to clinically diagnose this entity, highlight the importance of a multidisciplinary approach and present some of the latest data on the management of this disease.