Study reveals unknown way of breast cancer recurrence

Washington DC: The researchers followed treatment-resistant cancer cells that develop and spread after bad cancer treatment. For many women who thought they had conquered bad cancer, the news that he returned years later is a particularly cruel diagnosis, with no clear answer as to why or why he is reproducing.

Now, a team of researchers has provided extremely unknown details that could answer the question of why. "These are the cells that stay on the next therapy, and we know little about them because we do not see them.There are too few for them to appear in mammography or PET," said Principal author James. V. Alvarez.

"But by using murine models that reproduce recurrent HER2-positive bad cancers, which affect about 20% of women, we have been able to locate residual cancer cells that remain after treatment and study them," he added.

The researchers found that these treatment-resistant residual tumor cells did not resemble the original cancer cells, which grow and proliferate rapidly, according to the study published in the Journal of eLife.

Instead, they rest low and begin a complex interaction with the surrounding cells, particularly those of the immune system. Over time, they activate a horde of small signaling proteins, called cytokines, which are vital communicators of immune cells.

"There are drugs already approved or under development that inhibit macrophages in general or specifically the function of CCL5 .Our next step is to test these macrophage inhibitors to see if they can delay or prevent recurrence in the mice and they can kill dormant and dormant tumor cells, "the lead author Walens said.

"We are currently performing these experiments on mice and if it worked, we could start trying to go to a clinical trial to test these drugs in combination with anti-HER2 treatments," said Walens.