How valuable can proteogenomics be in clinical breast cancer research?

Abstract

Nearly, 45,000 women are estimated to die from breast cancer in 2022 in the US alone [1,2]. Breast cancer displays high heterogeneity with a wide spectrum of clinical, pathological, and molecular features, which makes it challenging for successful therapy. As we are inching toward the era of personalized medicine, advances in subtyping breast tumors have impacted prognosis and therapeutics [3]. Proteogenomics, which is an integrative profiling approach utilizing DNA, RNA, and protein data, has clearly played a critical role in illuminating the complexity of breast tumor biology, and predicting treatment response. Since DNA and RNA sequencing has gained momentum in breast cancer clinical assays including targeted mutation panel or RNA-based PAM50-based intrinsic subtyping, it is important to highlight the capabilities of integrative approaches rather than focusing on proteomics in silo. The complementation of proteomics platform provides an opportunity not just for biomarker assessment but also better quantification of targetable proteins and pathways. This methodological advancement provides an elaborate molecular landscape of breast tumors in light of treatment response and toxicity [4,5].