A research team from Switzerland has developed a new way to prevent cancer cells from moving from the breast to the brain.
Traveling and spreading from a primary tumor to a new, distant site in the body is one of the most puzzling aspects of deadly cancer.
This process is called metastasis, and it refers to the movement of cancer cells from one organ to another, which is simply defined as cancer cells on the move. After these malignant immigrants break away from the site of an initial tumor, they make a journey through the blood or lymphatic system to implant new tumors at other sites in the body. As many studies have shown, certain types of cancer have preferential sites to migrate to.
Scientists at the University of Friborg in Switzerland are studying the progression of cancer cell migration in breast cancer patients. Knowing how these cancer cells make their way to the brain helps lay the foundation for interventions that prevent these cells from metastasizing. Thus, its access to the brain is prevented. Preventing cells from reaching their target tissues is vital, say oncologists, because metastatic cancer is inevitably worse and harder to fight than the primary tumor.
“Metastasis of cancer cells to the brain results in a doubling increase in the incidence of advanced-stage breast cancer,” writes Dr. Jerrica LoRusso, whose lab focuses on experimental oncology. “It is a serious condition characterized by a rapid deterioration in quality of life. There is an urgent clinical need to develop effective therapies.” To prevent and treat cancer cells from moving to the brain.
Writing in the journal Science Translational Medicine, the researcher and her colleagues explain how proteins called connexins orchestrate the migration of breast cancer cells into the brain, an event that dramatically exacerbates patients’ poor prognosis.
The Swiss team conducted in vitro and in vivo studies to show that connexins and an enzyme focal adhesion kinase likely play a key role in brain invasion by cancer cells. Connexins belong to a family of proteins that form membrane channels between cells that allow the flow of ions and small molecules between neighboring cells.
Lorosso and her colleagues found that connexins, which are activated by the kinase enzyme, can in turn stimulate signaling pathways that maintain breast cancer cells in brain tissue. The team demonstrated in three different mouse models that connexins drive the spread of breast cancer cells into the brain. When the mice were treated with kinase inhibitors, a method already tested in human clinical trials, the growth of metastatic breast cancer cells in the brain was suppressed.
In light of clinical studies already underway with kinase inhibitors, LaRusso and her colleagues are looking forward to further therapeutic use of these molecules. “System treatment with kinase inhibitors reduced brain metastasis,” LoRusso writes.
“Given the limited treatment options for metastatic brain disease in cancer patients, we propose kinase inhibition as a candidate therapy,” LoRusso and co-authors concluded.
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