Proteomic Analysis of Inflammatory Biomarkers Associated with Breast Cancer Recurrence

Introduction: Breast cancer is the most frequent cancer detected for women, and while our ability to treat breast cancer has improved substantially over the years, recurrence remains a major obstacle. Standard screening for new and recurrent breast cancer involves clinical breast imaging. However, there is no clinically approved noninvasive body fluid test for the early detection of recurrent breast cancer. Materials and Method: In this study, we analyzed serum samples from both recurrent and nonrecurrent breast cancer patients by different proteomics methods to identify biomarkers in patients with recurrence of disease. Results: Comparative data analysis identified several histone deacetylase (HDAC) proteins, which were found at significantly higher levels in the serum of recurrent breast cancer patients: HDAC9 (C-term) (P = 0.0035), HDAC5 (C-term) (P = 0.013), small ubiquitin-like modifier 1 (N-term) (P = 0.017), embryonic stem cell-expressed Ras (inter) (P = 0.018), and HDAC7 (C-term) (P = 0.020). Chronic inflammation plays a critical role in the development of the breast cancer recurrence, and we identified several proinflammatory cytokines that were present at elevated levels only in recurrent breast cancer patient serum. Conclusions: Our data indicated that the epigenetic regulation of inflammatory processes plays a critical role in breast cancer recurrence. The identified proteins could lay the groundwork for the development of a serum-based breast cancer recurrence assay.