New publication by BREAST-PREDICT researchers
Congratulations to a number of BREAST-PREDICT researchers, including Elspeth Ward, Damir Varešlija, and Principal Investigator Leonie Young, who recently published an important paper in the journal ‘Clinical Cancer Research’.
Breast cancers whose growth is dependent on estrogens represent the majority of diagnosed cases. This estrogen responsiveness is good for survival outcome and presents an opportunity to successfully treat breast cancer using various hormone depleting therapies.
Despite the success of therapeutic approach, a significant portion of breast cancer patients eventually develop resistance to treatment which can lead to either breast cancer returning or spreading to other parts of the body.
In this study the authors report on a new way that breast cancer cells evade therapy and gain the ability to spread to other organs. A number of good outcome markers (i.e. genes that promote normal function in breast cells) appear to be switched off and silenced by a hormone regulator protein SRC-1. This is an unusual role for this gene and it is a new marker of therapy resistance.
This study found that SRC-1 recruits gene silencing machinery that highlights and marks these regions and makes them inaccessible. This combined loss of gene activity in these regions can be used to predict the patient cohorts that fail hormone depletion treatment in estrogen responsive breast cancer.
This opens up a possibility of supplementing current management strategies with therapies targeting the silencing machinery as a way of overcoming resistance to hormone depletion and prolonging survival of high-risk breast cancer patients.
Authors: Elspeth Ward1*, Damir Varešlija1*, Sara Charmsaz1, Ailis Fagan1, Alacoque L Browne1, Nicola Cosgrove1, Sinéad Cocchiglia1, Siobhan P Purcell1, Lance Hudson1, Sudipto Das2, Darran O’Connor2, Philip J O’Halloran3, Andrew H Sims4, Arnold D Hill1, Leonie S Young1
*These authors contributed equally to this study.
BREAST-PREDICT funded authors highlighted in bold.
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