Glutathione S-transferases (GSTs) polymorphism and taxane (docetaxel) sensitivity in breast cancer

The neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) has been commonly used in breast cancer treatment, especially for advanced staged patients. NAC lets alteration of inoperable cancer to operable, and reduces the size of tumor eventually allowing mastectomy cases to receive breast conserving surgery (1). Furthermore, recent studies suggested the predictive role of NAC for prognosis. Tumors with pathologic complete response (pCR) to NAC showed a more favorable prognosis than the tumors with no pCR, although its correlation varies among molecular subtypes. Among these subtypes, hormone receptor positive and HER-2 negative tumors (HR+/HER2−) shows about 8.3% (6.7–10.2%) pCR rate, which is the relatively low rate compared to other subtype tumors (2). This reflects the resistance of HR+/HER2− tumors against chemotherapeutic agents and suggests the needs to select HR+/HER2− tumors which are sensitive to chemotherapy for the improvement of NAC effect.