CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (CBS19 NEWS) — Researchers at the University of Virginia Cancer Center have identified a gene that may be responsible for the metastasis, or spread, of triple-negative breast cancer into other parts of the body.
According to a release, they have also developed a potential way to stop this process.
Triple-negative breast cancer, called TNBC for short, is an aggressive form of the disease and claims about 40,000 lives in the United States each year. Patients with metastatic tumors have the highest death rate of cancer patients in the country.
The release says many of those deaths result from a resistance to chemotherapy and aggressive metastases.
So the researchers wanted to know what causes a primary tumor to become metastatic.
The researchers found that an oncogene called TRIM37 causes the cancer to spread and makes it resistant to chemotherapy.
“Despite metastasis being the key reason for failure of cancer therapies, it remains poorly understood. We do not clearly understand what drives the metastatic growth in patients,” said Sanchita Bhatnagar, PhD, who was the first to identify TRIM37 as a breast cancer oncogene. “In general, several genes are altered during tumorigenesis. However, whether targeting the same genes will prevent metastatic transition remains to be addressed.”
The release says there has been promising research from the team that shows targeting TRIM37 can prevent metastatic lesions in mouse models, which led to work looking into the role of this oncogene in racial disparities in TNBC.
It adds that the incidence of the disease is disproportionately higher in African-American women compared to other races, with a five-year survival rate in African-American patients of just 14 percent compared to 36 percent for others.
The researchers have developed a new approach to stop the effects of the oncogene and potentially prevent or delay the spread of TNBC. It is also hoped this approach could lower the disease’s resistance to chemotherapy.
This approach uses nanoparticles of fat to deliver treatment to block TRIM37 by pairing the nanoparticles with specially engineered antibodies to bind to the cancerous cells.
“As soon as the antibody finds the triple-negative breast cancer cell, it binds to the receptor and is taken up by the cell,” explained Jogender Tushir-Singh, PhD, of UVA’s Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics.
They estimate that blocking the gene could help about 80 percent of TNBC patients by reducing the expression of TRIM37 and preventing the spread of the cancer.
The release says this approach may also be used to target treatment to other cancers, especially by adding selectivity in targeting specific cells.
“That would not only get the treatment where it needs to be but, hopefully, help prevent unwanted side effects. Besides preventing metastases, it adds selectivity,” Bhatnagar said. “A problem in the field is, how will you give a nanoparticle treatment to the patients? Most of these nanoparticles are cleared by the liver, so they never have a chance to really do their job. In this study, researchers bypassed this issue by delivering nanoparticles by nasal route, increasing the rate of uptake in the lungs, one of the most common metastatic target sites in TNBC patients.”
This research is still in its early stages, but tests with lab mice have already been showing encouraging results.
Now the researchers need to work on verifying that TRIM37 targeting could be a potential treatment approach.
The findings have been published in the scientific journal Cancer Research.
Source https://www.cbs19news.com