PURPOSE Triple-negative breast cancer, has a significant clinical relevance being associated with a shorter median time to relapse and death and does not respond to endocrine therapy or other available targeted agents. For this reason, identifying the molecular pathways associated with increased aggressiveness, for example the presence of stem cell populations within the tumor and alteration of...

Breast cancer remains the second leading cause of cancer deaths in women in the United States. Triple negative breast cancer, tumors lacking estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor, and Her2, only comprise about 20– 30% of breast tumors diagnosed. However, due to the lack of specific targeted therapy as exists for ER+ or Her2+ tumors, they account for many of the breast cancer deaths. To devel...

The MEK5-ERK5 pathway is a mammalian mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase cascade that is not well studied compared to other MAP kinase cascades. Two independent studies by Al-Ejeh et al. and Ortiz-Ruiz et al. published in Oncotarget last year concluded that ERK5 is an attractive target in triple negative breast cancer. In this perspective, we briefly describe the findings of these studies an...

Triple-negative breast cancers have a poor prognosis and are not amenable to endocrine- or HER2-targeted therapies. The prevailing view is that targeting the insulin-like growth factor (IGF) signal transduction pathway will not be beneficial for triple-negative breast cancers because their growth is not IGF-responsive. The present study investigates the importance of IGFs in the proliferation a...

Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), an aggressive subtype of breast cancer, display poor prognosis and exhibit resistance to conventional therapies, partly due to an enrichment in breast cancer stem cells (BCSCs). Here, we investigated the role of the cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2), a downstream target of TGFβ, in regulating BCSCs in TNBC. Bioinformatics analysis revealed that COX-2 is highly expre...

We report the ability of a novel combinatorial therapy obtained from nanoparticles of hyperstar polymers encompassing drugs to selectively target triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) cell proliferation through STAT3 and topoisomerase-II pathways. This nano-cocktail was at least two to four fold better than the individual drugs and 6-20 times more selective than the parent drugs.

The results of recent studies investigating the role of platinum-based chemotherapy (PBCT) in metastatic triple-negative breast cancer (mTNBC) were conflicting. We retrospectively investigated a large cohort (n = 379) of mTNBC to re-evaluate the role of platinums. Longer PFS was found in patients with PBCT than those with non-PBCT (7.8 vs. 4.9 months, P < 0.001) as first-line chemotherapy, but ...

Author Addresses and Affiliations: 1 Centre for Information-Based Medicine, Hunter Medical Research Institute, John Hunter Hospital, New Lambton Heights, NSW, 2305, Australia. 2 School of Biomedical Sciences and Pharmacy, Faculty of Health, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, 2308, Australia. 3 Hunter Area Pathology Service, John Hunter Hospital, New Lambton Heights, NSW, 2305, Australia. ...

Heterogenous subtypes of breast cancer need to be analyzed separately. Pooling of datasets can provide reasonable sample sizes but dataset bias is an important concern. We assembled a combined dataset of 579 Affymetrix microarrays from triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) in Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) series GSE31519. We developed a method for selecting comparable datasets and to control for...

The efficacy of adjuvant radiotherapy for the treatment of triple negative breast cancer patients with varying numbers of positive lymph nodes is not clear. We assessed the association between adjuvant radiotherapy and survival in 943 T1/T2 triple negative breast cancer patients treated at our institute between 2008 and 2012. We determined that post-operative radiotherapy improved overall survi...