New Study Finds A New Way To Detect Breast Cancer
Saved under Health, Science
Tags: Basal-like breast cancer, Breast Cancer, Cancer, Health, triple negative
Please follow & like us :)
A new study performed at the Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) has found a new cancer marker for detecting Basal-like breast cancer (BLBC). BLBC is one of the deadliest types of breast cancer because it does not respond to common medical therapeutics and is often referred to as the “triple negative”.
It is associated with a very poor prognosis and it is very likely to spread to different areas of the body and metastasize. The group with the highest risk factor for this breast cancer type are women under the age of 40 and African-American women. Once this cancer metastasizes it has very low treatment success.
To develop successful drugs and treatments, researchers need to find specific markers for BLBC and the researchers from BUSM and the University of Cyprus seem to have found one that will help them make a big step forward. Researchers canvassed cancer cells from breast tumors that can be found in international public databases and found that a molecule named IL13RA2 (IL13R alpha2) was abundant in metastatic or late-stage BLBC. By checking how high the levels of this molecule were in the cancer cells, the researchers were able to determine the likelihood of survival without progression. They also found that one of the subtypes of BLBC that usually quickly spreads to the lungs had high IL13RA2 levels.
By doing tests on models they were able to determine that IL13RA2 was involved in cancer growth and spread. When they lowered the amount of IL13RA2 expression in the cancer cells they saw that the tumor growth was much slower in their models and that they had low to none metastasis to the lungs.
“This discovery offers a glimmer of hope for patients stricken with BLBC. Personalized cancer therapies could be developed by targeting breast cancer cells that express copious levels of IL13RA2,” explained corresponding author Sam Thiagalingam, PhD, associate professor of genetics & genomics, medicine and pathology & laboratory medicine at BUSM.
The researchers also found that other deadly forms of cancer can have high levels of IL13RA2 which suggests its importance. Among them are brain, pancreatic, ovarian, and colonic cancers. “Studies directed at this biomarker will be of high significance to improve the quality of life of all cancer patients harboring this alteration,” added Thiagalingam.
This research was published on Breast-Cancer-Research.com
By Dean Smith
