The potential role and status of IL-17 family cytokines in breast cancer.

Breast cancer (BC) is currently the most common malignant tumor of women in the world. At present, the development of BC is accelerating and showing a younger trend, which may be due to the known and/or unknown risk factors (RFs) for BC are increasing. It has been reported that inflammatory factors promote the occurrence and development of BC. No doubt chronic inflammation could trigger a series of molecular events, which will lead to the malignant transformation of differentiated cells, inhibition of anti-tumor immunity, and finally, lead to the occurrence and metastasis of tumors. With the deepening of research, it has been found that pro-inflammatory cytokine-interleukin-17 (IL-17) is closely related to BC. It not only plays an important role in promoting tumor proliferation, invasion and metastasis, but also has a significant correlation with poor prognosis. Recently, it was reported that IL-17 is closely related to programmed death ligand 1 (PD-L1) in BC. Therefore, starting with the role of IL-17 family cytokines in BC, this paper briefly discusses the potential role and status of IL-17 and seeks to contribute to the development of targeted drugs for BC-related treatments and to the identification of prediction factors for the early detection and prognosis prediction of BC for laying a solid theoretical foundation.