• Anti-Angiogenic Therapies for Breast Cancer: Future Therapeutic Strategies
  • Jeiran Haghighi ,1,* Mohammad Amin Dehghani ,2
    1. School of Pharmacy, Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, Ahvaz, Iran
    2. Student Research Committee of Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, Ahvaz, Iran


  • Introduction: Angiogenesis is assumed essential for tumor growth as well as favorable therapeutic targets. Accordingly, anti-angiogenic therapy has been suggested to have considerable potentials for cancer treatments. Nevertheless; since recent clinical trials in this domain have reported limited efficacy of anti-angiogenic agents to increase patient survival rates, effectiveness of such treatments in breast cancer patients has been disputed.
  • Methods: The relevant literature in English published in the database of PubMed was searched using the keywords of breast cancer, angiogenesis, anti-angiogenic therapy, clinical trials, as well as therapeutic strategies.
  • Results: The findings revealed that previous studies had examined the use of anti-angiogenics in unselected populations with no consideration of heterogeneity of breast cancer and absence of predictive biomarkers. Recent investigations employing pre-clinical models had also advocated that anti-angiogenic agents could improve invasive and metastatic characteristics of breast cancer cells. Given the large number of mediators in this domain, identification of a single biomarker had been demonstrated to be a complicated process. Moreover; considering the complexity of angiogenic pathway, genomic and proteomic techniques could be of importance to identify such markers and they could be also more reliable than a single biomarker if combined.
  • Conclusion: It was suggested to identify biomarkers in further studies as a higher therapeutic benefit which could be observed in selected patients. It was also crucial to identify and deal with other clinical and scientific challenges including primary and acquired mechanisms of resistance to anti-angiogenic therapies.
  • Keywords: Breast Cancer, Angiogenesis, Anti-Angiogenic Therapy, Clinical Trial, Therapeutic Strategy.