Adjuvant endocrine treatment with aromatase inhibitors improves disease-free survival compared with tamoxifen in postmenopausal women with estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer.
Our study demonstrated genetic polymorphisms of ERalpha, CYP19A1, COMT and p53 genes frequently occur in ER-positive breast cancer in premenopausal Japanese women.
Estrogen deprivation using aromatase inhibitors is one of the standard treatments for postmenopausal women with estrogen receptor (ER)-positive breast cancer.
In this model, tumors of human estrogen receptor (ER) positive breast cancer cells stably transfected with aromatase (Ac-1) are grown in immune-compromised mice.
Currently, the standard of care for estrogen receptor (ER)-positive breast cancer is 5 years of tamoxifen (TAM) or an aromatase inhibitor (AI) such as anastrozole.
Aromatase is the enzyme responsible for the conversion of androgens into estrogens, and synthetic aromatase inhibitors such as letrozole, anastrozole, and exemestane have proven to be effective endocrine regimens for ER-positive breast cancer.
The combination of these two polymorphisms was found to be more useful in the assessment of the ER-positive breast cancer risk (OR=3.00, 95% CI=1.56-5.74) than the CYP19 (TTTA)7(-3bp) polymorphism alone.
Our laboratory has also evaluated the growth-inhibiting activity of aromatase inhibitors in estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer using three-dimensional cell cultures of aromatase-over expressing MCF-7 and T-47D cell lines (i.e.MCF-7aro and T-47Daro).