Factors Behind Recurrence of Breast Cancer Discovered!

Recurrence of breast cancer can be predicted through newly discovered factors as per a study at the Georgetown University Medical Center, published in Scientific Reports. The study team isolated breast epithelial cells (layer of cells that form the ducts and lobes which make milk during lactation) using the conditionally reprogrammed cells (CRC — invented and patented at Georgetown).

CRC is the only system that can efficiently help grow millions of healthy as well as cancer cells in a week, with a reduced risk of cell contamination (one of the commonly encountered problems in studying epithelial cell cultures).

Genetic Findings on Breast Cancer

The findings thereby pave way for preventing a new tumor from developing. The team focussed especially on RNA sequences in a cell — the transcriptome (which helps determine the turning on or off of a gene in the cell).

It was found that there were significant changes in genes (altered RNA) of women who had chemotherapy before their surgery — prognostic indicators for cancer.

Moreover, it was also found that specific RNA alterations were associated with the formation of mammary stem cells (self-renewing adult stem cells that further differentiate, or change function, into specialized mammary epithelial cells).

“When a person is diagnosed with breast cancer, we have several tools, including testing for genes such as BRCA1/2, to decide whether they should get certain kinds of chemotherapy or just receive hormonal therapy. But the tools we have are not as precise as we would like. About one in eight women are diagnosed with breast cancer in the developed world. We hope that our findings will help lead to more precise and directed screening in the future, sparing women unneeded procedures as we currently screen almost all women between the ages of 40 to 70, sometimes very aggressively,” says Priscilla Furth, MD, professor of oncology and medicine at Georgetown Lombardi and corresponding author of the study.

Source-Medindia