Single Cell Omics of Breast Cancer: An Update on Characterization and Diagnosis

Breast cancer is recognized for its different clinical behaviors and patient outcomes, regardless of common histopathological features at diagnosis. The heterogeneity and dynamics of breast cancer undergoing clonal evolution produces cells with distinct degrees of drug resistance and metastatic potential. Presently, single cell analysis have made outstanding advancements, overshadowing the hurdles of heterogeneity linked with vast populations. The speedy progression in sequencing analysis now allow unbiased, high-output and high-resolution elucidation of the heterogeneity from individual cell within a population. Classical therapeutics strategies for individual patients are governed by the presence and absence of expression pattern of the estrogen and progesterone receptors and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2. However, such tactics for clinical classification have fruitfulness in selection of targeted therapies, short-term patient responses but unable to predict the long-term survival. In any phenotypic alterations, like breast cancer disease, molecular signature have proven its implication, as we aware that individual cell's state is regulated at diverse levels, such as DNA, RNA and protein, by multifaceted interplay of intrinsic biomolecules pathways existing in the organism and extrinsic stimuli such as ambient environment. Thus for complete understanding, complete profiling of single cell requires a synchronous investigations from different levels (multi-omics) to avoid incomplete information produced from single cell. In this article, initially we briefed on novel updates of various methods available to explore omics and then we finally pinpointed on various omics (i.e. genomics, transcriptomics, epigenomics, proteomics and metabolomics) data and few special aspects of circulating tumor cells, disseminated tumor cells and cancer stem cells, so far available from various studies that can be used for better management of breast cancer patients.