Personalising the Fight against Triple Negative Breast Cancer

Triple Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC) is a highly heterogeneous disease. Lacking hormone receptors, ER and PR, as well as HER2 amplification, these cancers cannot be treated with more modern, targeted therapies such as tamoxifen or trastuzumab. Thus, the current standard of care for these patients is cytotoxic chemotherapy with varied clinical response. However, all patients experience unwanted and debilitating side effects regardless of response. Therefore, TNBC represents a significant unmet clinical need and finding more targeted and effective treatment approaches for this aggressive disease is an area of active research. The success of such agents has been hindered by the heterogeneity of the disease, with many new drugs only showing promising results in small populations. In order for targeted treatments to succeed, predictive biomarkers must be developed which can stratify patients and drive treatment choices. This review looks at the most promising areas of research regarding targeted therapy in TNBC as well as associated biomarkers that can be used to guide treatment.