Peeking into the Black Box: How Cytokine Antibody Arrays Shed Light on Molecular Mechanisms of Breast Cancer Development and its Treatment

The detection of multiple proteins is essential not only to unraveling the mysteries of breast cancer, but also to the identification of important biomarkers and therapeutic targets relevant to breast cancer. Antibody arrays are a powerful platform for accelerating discovery in breast cancer research, allowing the researcher to rapidly detect expression profiles of multiple proteins and phosphorylation signatures. To date, antibody arrays have already been used to identify key factors in estrogen receptor (ER) status and ErbB-2 status, to explore the molecular mechanisms of breast cancer drug resistance, tumor self seeding, and tumor cell-stroma cell interaction, and to discover breast cancer drug targets and biomarkers for breast cancer metastasis. The significant insights gained through these studies clearly illustrate the promise of antibody array technologies in breast cancer research. This mini-review summarizes many exciting discoveries of breast cancer research revealed by using cytokine antibody array technologies.