Early Cancer Metastasis Discovery May Allow for Better Treatment

ErenTo

.... Decisions

This goes against the current standard of care for early-stage breast cancer recurrence monitoring. As much as I like to have my head buried in the sand, this line of research could potentially lead to more testing/scans.

Caveat: this is a research done in a lab dish across various cancer types, not only BC. There are also no therapy options available at this point.

When the environment in the tumor became too confined, the cells turned on a specific set of genes, the team discovered. The activation of the genes was linked to patient survival and cancer metastasis in people with breast and a range of other cancers.

The discovery makes it possible for physicians to assess if these genes are active, and therefore gain insight into whether the tumor is aggressive or not. This, in turn, may impact what treatments they choose for a particular patient.

They believed — based on previous knowledge of how such cells behave in normal lab dishes — that their experiments would show that a denser matrix would block the cells' spread. But they were in for a surprise.

"We thought that putting cells into this more constrained environment would prevent their spread," said Daniel Ortiz Velez, the study's first author and a PhD student in Fraley's lab. "But the opposite happened."

https://breastcancer-news.com/2017/12/06/early-can...