MADRID, 27 Abr. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center have identified genetics and other factors that can determine whether a woman is at risk of breast cancer recurrence, providing new avenues of investigation to prevent the development of a new tumor.
The discovery, published in the journal Scientific Reports, was made possible by advanced technology developed at Georgetown Lombardi that allows lab researchers to greatly enlarge or multiply hard-to-extract breast tissue cells.
The researchers focused on the epithelial cells of the breast, which are the layer of cells that form the ducts and lobules that produce milk during lactation. The researchers extracted these cells from donated noncancerous tissue in the same breast that had cancerous tissue removed during a mastectomy.
They were looking for numerous factors that could trigger recurrence, but their main target was the set of RNA sequences in a cell – the transcriptome – that help determine when and where each gene in a cell is turned on or off.
Although surgical techniques continue to improve, undetectable microscopic pieces of tumor may remain and are a factor in breast cancer recurrence in up to 15% of women, sometimes years after surgery; People with hormone receptor-positive breast cancer have the highest risk of recurrence.
Analyzing expanded epithelial cells from women who underwent chemotherapy before surgery, the researchers found significantly altered RNA. In particular, they observed significant changes in genes that had previously been recognized as prognostic indicators of cancer.
“When a person is diagnosed with breast cancer, we have various tools, such as testing for genes such as BRCA1/2, to decide whether to receive certain types of chemotherapy or only receive hormonal therapy. But the tools we have do not they are as accurate as we would like them to be,” explains Dr. Priscilla Furth, professor of oncology and medicine at Georgetown Lombardi and corresponding author of the study.
“Approximately one in eight women is diagnosed with breast cancer in the developed world,” she said. “We hope that our findings will help make screening more accurate and targeted in the future, sparing women unnecessary procedures, as Today we screen almost all women between the ages of 40 and 70, sometimes very aggressively.”
The researchers also note that there are implications for women who have not had breast cancer, as some of the RNA alterations were related to the formation of breast stem cells.
Stem cells are self-renewing and are involved in growth and development. Mammary stem cells are adult stem cells that can differentiate, or change function, into specialized mammary epithelial cells.
If these cells become dysregulated, the potential for cancer increases. Cells from pregnant women were of particular interest to the researchers, as pregnancy often triggers additional turnover cycles in a cell, potentially increasing cancer risk.
This research work was greatly aided by the conditionally reprogrammed cell (CRC) technique, invented and patented in Georgetown. In this study, CRC was used for the initial isolation of epithelial cells.
CRC is the only known system that can culture both healthy and cancerous cells indefinitely; up to a million new cells can be grown in a week. Until now, one of the main problems in the study of these cells was that epithelial cell cultures used to be contaminated with the other cell types, in particular fibroblasts, which grow very rapidly in culture while epithelial cells grow faster. little slower.
Primary tumor cells can also be difficult to isolate, but the researchers had more success using the CCR technique compared to conventional methods.
“A lot of our cancer survivors say to me, ‘Please do work that benefits my daughter.’ My response is that’s why I’m in the field of cancer prevention,” says Furth. to prevent the occurrence or recurrence of cancer is a significant advance and we believe this finding can make an important contribution to reducing misdiagnosis, as well as pointing to ways to develop better therapies to treat the disease.”
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