Clinical proteomics and breast cancer: strategies for diagnostic and therapeutic biomarker discovery.

A major challenge of breast cancer research is the identification of accurate biomarkers that improve screening, early diagnosis, prediction of aggressiveness, and prediction of therapeutic response or toxicity, as well as the identification of new molecular therapeutic targets. The new proteomic techniques promise to be valuable for identifying such tissue and serum markers. The different techniques currently applied to clinical samples of breast cancer and the most important results obtained are summarized in this review.