Triple-negative breast cancer: New therapeutic options via signalling transduction cascades

Triple-negative breast cancer is a highly aggressive type of mammalian carcinoma. It is defined by a rather weak expression of estrogen-, progesterone- and Her2-receptor, and is thus difficult to treat, resulting in low disease-free and overall survival rates of the affected patients. Hence it is important to find new therapeutic options. To this aim we analysed the incidence of some molecules from different signal transduction cascades by immunohistochemistry, which are known to correlate with triple-negative breast cancer, and correlated the expression of these molecules to different tumour traits, such as size, grading, menopausal stage, histology, lymph node affection, remote metastasis formation, and to the incidence of local and lymph node recurrence and metastasis by statistical analysis. Statistically significant correlations were found for a number of tumour characteristics and signalling molecules: HIF1α is correlated to tumour grading, β-catenin to the menopausal state of the patient, and for Notch1 a relation to lymph node affection is seen. In terms of different recurrences, a correlation of β-catenin to metastasis formation and lymph node affection could be shown, as well as coherences between XBP1 and lymph node recurrence, Notch1 and metastasis formation and FOXP3 and the occurrence of local recurrence. The presented results are in accordance with formerly published studies and therefore might comprise opportunities to develop new therapeutical strategies, which could help to handle this aggressive form of breast cancer in a manner, by which side effects would be reduced and therapeutical efficiency is increased.