Profile of Plasma Galectin-3 Concentrations, Inflammatory Cytokines Levels and Lymphocytes Status in Breast Cancer under Chemotherapy

We investigated relationship between galectin-3 (Gal-3) levels and T lymphocytes apoptosis and the activation rates in breast cancer during chemotherapy. We used plasma samples from 112 women classified into two groups: 70 women with breast cancer (BC) and submitted to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (3 cycles) and 42 healthy women used as controls. In the group of BC, blood samples were taken before each cycle of chemotherapy and Gal-3 levels was evaluated by ELISA sandwich. Flow cytometry was used to study T cells apoptosis and activation. Before treatment, median value of Gal-3 was 6.31 ng/ml (range 1.07 - 50.74) in BC and 0.84 ng/ml (range 0.00 - 4.82) in HC. Gal-3 levels were highest in plasmas from BC (p p p = 0.010). In addition, we found a dynamic relationship between gal-3 levels, tumor size and T lymphocytes apoptosis rates during treatment depending to the cure efficiency. We suggest gal-3 plasma concentrations could be used as predictive biomarker for chemotherapy efficiency in breast cancer patients.