Identification of key genes controlling docetaxel resistance in patients with breast cancer

Abstract Breast cancer is the most common malignant tumor in women. Chemotherapy is a very important part of its comprehensive treatment. Docetaxel is a commonly used chemotherapy drug in breast cancer treatment. However, some patients will develop drug resistance during use. To further explore this issue, we conducted an in-depth analysis on gene expression data of 24 breast cancer patients from GEO. Key module and hub genes were searched through WGCNA network construction, KEGG and GO function analysis, PPI network construction and other methods. Functional analysis revealed that the key module mainly related to drug transport events such as phagocytosis, cell-cell adhesion, and extracellular exosome. TCGA data were used to further verify these hub genes. Finally, we screened out 4 most important key genes, RPS2, EEF2, RPL15 and RPLP1, from 55 hub genes. These findings may highlight some therapeutic targets for predicting, avoiding or overcoming docetaxel resistance.