Focus on the Multimodal Role of Biomarkers in Breast Cancer.

Breast cancer is the most common type of malignancy affecting women worldwide and also stands being the most diagnosed one. Mammography is considered as the golden standard for diagnosis but there are high chances that it can give false- negative as well as false-positive test results. Finding cost-effective, readily available diagnosis along with increased sensitivity as well as specificity is the need right now to decrease the mortality as well as the morbidity rate. The application of biomarkers to clinical use has paved the way for a better prognosis, diagnosis, detection, screening and better clinical results. The efficacy of the treatment is enhanced. Biomarkers are known to cause an advancement in breast cancer study and are expected to improve the quality of life in patients. Not only tissue biomarkers but serum and circulating biomarkers are also of significance in patients. This review highlights the particulars about the current use and application of biomarkers in an effective prognosis, detection, treatment of the breast cancer and also the ones which are currently being studied under clinical trials and have the potential to be advantageous and more specific in the future.

Nitrogen-Containing Heterocycles as Anticancer Agents: An Overview.

BACKGROUND: Cancer is spreading all over the world, and it is becoming the leading cause of major deaths. Today's most difficult task for every researcher is to invent a new drug that can treat cancer with minimal side effects. Many factors, including pollution, modern lifestyle and food habits, exposure to oncogenic agents or radiations, enhanced industrialization, etc. can cause cancer. Treatment of cancer is done by various methods that include chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery and immunotherapy in combination or singly along with kinase inhibitors. Most of the anti-cancer drugs use the concept of kinase inhibition. OBJECTIVE: The number of drugs being used in chemotherapy has heterocycles as their basic structure in spite of various side effects. Medicinal chemists are focusing on nitrogen-containing heterocyclic compounds like pyrrole, pyrrolidine, pyridine, imidazole, pyrimidines, pyrazole, indole, quinoline, oxadiazole, azole, benzimidazole, etc. as the key building blocks to develop active biological compounds. The aim of this study is to attempt to compile a dataset of nitrogen-containing heterocyclic anti-cancer drugs. METHODS: We adopted a structural search on notorious journal publication websites and electronic databases such as Bentham Science, Science Direct, PubMed, Scopus, USFDA, etc. for the collection of peer-reviewed research and review articles for the present review. The quality papers were retrieved, studied, categorized into different sections, analyzed and used for article writing. CONCLUSION: As per FDA databases, nitrogen-based heterocycles in the drug design are almost 60% of unique small-molecule drugs. Some of the nitrogen-containing heterocyclic anti-cancer drugs are Axitinib, Bosutinib, Cediranib, Dasatanib (Sprycel®), Erlotinib (Tarceva®), Gefitinib (Iressa®), Imatinib (Gleevec®), Lapatinib (Tykerb ®), Linifanib, Sorafenib (Nexavar®), Sunitinib (Sutent®), Tivozanib, etc. In the present review, we shall focus on the overview of nitrogen-containing heterocyclic active compounds as anti-cancer agents.