Breast cancer gene therapy

Abstract

Breast cancer, one of the most common female malignancy around the world, is a major public health problem. It is estimated that 1 woman in 9 will develop breast cancer during her lifetime. Conventional therapies, such as radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and hormonal therapy, have become more efficient in recent years. However, even if response is relatively good to treatments for cancers detected and treated early, the prognosis remains poor for advanced cancers due to the presence of metastases. As alternative to these conventional therapies, gene therapy is increasingly designed as a treatment solution to treat different types of cancers, such as breast cancer, ovarian cancer, lung cancer, cervix cancer, etc. Gene therapy is to repair a defective gene by introducing a healthy gene having a sequence of genetic information (DNA or RNA) into a cell to modify the expression of specific genetic program of that cell. It permits to target the causes of a disease that it is due to the mutation of a single gene or a more complex disorder. However, this repair usually requires the use of a kind of Trojan horse, which will introduce a healthy gene into the genome of the mutant cell responsible for cancer. Defined in the broad sense, gene therapy includes immunogene therapy, suicide gene therapy, correction of tumor suppressor genes, as well as oncogenes and antiangiogenic gene therapy. At this time, since gene therapy is experimental and far from clinical application running, the current data do not allow to use this approach as a alternative treatment to conventional therapy.