PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
31-Mar-2014
Contact: Tomas Llewelyn Barrett BarrettTL1@cardiff.ac.uk Cardiff University
Breast cancers can look and behave very differently. Understanding why and how they do so is key to designing more tailored therapies for patients and sparing them unnecessary treatments.
In a new study published by the Journal of Pathology, Dr Matt Smalley from Cardiff University treads new ground in exploring what drives breast cancers to look and behave so differently from one another.
"The ultimate aim of this research is to be able to take a more personalised approach to medicine," said Dr Smalley from Cardiff University's European Cancer Stem Cell Research Institute. "We hope that in doing so, patients get the therapy best suited to their variety of breast cancer and avoid unnecessary treatment.
"To understand what might be influencing the differences between individual breast cancers, we have used two different genetically modified mouse models in which breast cancers originate in different cell types in each model, by means of a genetic 'trick'," he explained.
"In one part of the study, we created the same cancer-predisposing genetic errors in each of the two cell types. In another part, we created different genetic errors in the same cell type. We then asked whether the tumour types which occurred varied more strongly in their appearance depending on the cells in which they developed, or the genetic errors that caused the cancers, or both."
Dr Smalley continued: "We found that for cells originating in one of the cell types, so-called 'basal' cells, the cancers appeared the same no matter the genetic error, suggesting that in this case the cell of origin was dominant in determining how the cancer formed. However, the cancers that appeared from this cell type resembled a very rare form of human breast cancer, so these cells are probably not relevant to the majority of human cases.
"In contrast, for tumours originating in so-called 'estrogen receptor negative luminal cells', the appearance of the cancers varied depending on the genetic errors used to generate them.
Read more from the original source:
Novel study into breast cancer origins paves way for personalized treatment