Editorial: Perspectives in Mammary Gland Development and Breast Cancer Research

Abstract

Editorial on the Research Topic Perspectives in Mammary Gland Development and Breast Cancer Research Annually, researchers from around the world, who work in the field of mammary gland biology and breast cancer and related areas, have a great opportunity to meet and discuss their work at a conference organized by the European Network of Breast Development and Cancer (ENBDC). These meetings, entitled Annual ENBDC Workshop: Methods in mammary gland biology and breast cancer, are largely methodologically oriented. They enable not only presentation of the latest scientific results, but also dissemination of cutting-edge approaches and forefront technologies that have facilitated these discoveries. The latest meeting took place on the 16th to 18th of May 2019 in Weggis, Switzerland, and presented exciting findings achieved using high resolution 'omics approaches, genetic mouse models, organoids, and state-of-the-art imaging (Vafaizadeh et al., 2019). Here, we present a collection of articles based on or related to the topics of the ENBDC workshop. Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women, annually diagnosed in more than 2.1 million women worldwide and more than 650,000 women worldwide die from this heterogeneous disease every year. To improve treatment strategies, deep understanding of breast cancer and metastasis is required. In their review, Parsons and Francavilla discuss how genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics datasets, in combination with traditional breast cancer models, provide insights into breast cancer biology and enable discovery of novel therapeutic targets or biomarkers. They also emphasize the importance of transparent data sharing in data repositories to allow further meta-analysis and potential discoveries of previously unnoticed biomarkers or therapeutic targets. Waterhouse et al. further discuss the challenges of targeting driver oncogenes of triple negative breast cancer (TNBC). They suggest that identification of protein-protein interactions of TNBC oncogenes is needed to understand their functions in TNBC and to reveal novel therapeutic targets. They provide a nice overview of current and emerging agents for targeting TNBC oncogenes on cell surface, cytoplasm, and nucleus, including different genetic and epigenetic strategies for targeting transcription factors. Three of the articles are focused on specific signaling pathways in breast cancer. van Schie and van Amerongen highlight the role of aberrant WNT-CTNNB1 signaling in human breast cancer and discuss three major gaps in this field: (i) Incomplete understanding of WNT signaling functions in normal human breast development and physiology, (ii) lack of knowledge of the extent and effect of (epi)genetic changes in the WNT pathway in different breast cancer subtypes, and

Impaired histone inheritance promotes tumor progression

“…The failure of H3K27me3 restoration across cell divisions can re-activate mammary gland development processes (Fig. 2d ) that are often hijacked by breast cancer cells as drivers for tumor progression 48 , 49 .…”