Emerging biomarkers in breast cancer care

Currently, decision-making for breast cancer treatment in the clinical setting is mainly based on clinical data, histomorphological features of the tumor tissue and a few cancer biomarkers such as steroid hormone receptor status (estrogen and progesterone receptors) and oncoprotein HER2 status. Although various therapeutic options were introduced into the clinic in recent decades, with the objective of improving surgery, radiotherapy, biochemotherapy and chemotherapy, varying response of individual patients to certain types of therapy and therapy resistance is still a challenge in breast cancer care. Therefore, since breast cancer treatment should be based on individual features of the patient and her tumor, tailored therapy should be an option by integrating cancer biomarkers to define patients at risk and to reliably predict their course of the disease and/or response to cancer therapy. Recently, candidate-marker approaches and genome-wide transcriptomic and epigenetic screening of different breast cancer tissues and bodily fluids resulted in new promising biomarker panels, allowing breast cancer prognosis, prediction of therapy response and monitoring of therapy efficacy. These biomarkers are now subject of validation in prospective clinical trials.