No association between ABCB1 G2677T/A or C3435T polymorphisms and survival of breast cancer patients - a 10-year follow-up study in the Polish population

Many intensive studies are devoted to identifying novel cancer diagnostics or therapy strategies that would boost cancer therapy efficacy and recovery rates. Importantly, polymorphisms in the genes coding for ABC family proteins were considered good candidates for cancer development risk or cancer drug resistance markers. For this reason, we decided to assess the contribution of ABCB1’s most common variants (i.e., G2677T/A in exon 21/rs2032582 and C3435T in exon 26/rs1045642) to the cancer therapy response in breast cancer patients. A 10-year follow-up analysis of 157 breast cancer patients was performed. Clinical assessment, ABCB1 polymorphism status, estrogen/progesterone/human epidermal receptors status, and other characteristics were compared according to the follow-up status using the Chi-square statistic. For the analysis of overall survival curves in TCGA breast cancer patients, the Xena browser was used. We show that neither 2677 nor 3435 polymorphisms contributed to the survival of breast cancer patients. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, estrogen and progesterone receptors status were good prognostic factors and positively correlated with a disease-free survival for up to 10 years. To summarize, ABCB1 polymorphisms status may be one of the numerous factors that affect cancer development. However, they may not be the critical ones when it comes to risk or recovery assessment. Consequently, they may not be treated as reliable prognostic or predictive markers in breast cancer patients’ evaluation, which supports the previous findings and current knowledge.