HomeLifestyleHealth & FitnessRare Hard-To-Extract Cells Spotted Can Predict Cancer Recurrence

Rare Hard-To-Extract Cells Spotted Can Predict Cancer Recurrence

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Investigators at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center have uncovered genetics and other characteristics that can predict if a woman is at risk for a recurrence of cancer, opening up new research possibilities for preventing a new tumor from growing.

The breakthrough came possible by Georgetown Lombardi’s sophisticated technology, which allows laboratory researchers to dramatically expand, or multiply, difficult-to-extract breast tissue cells.

Scientific Reports published the discovery on April 22, 2022.

Breast epithelial cells, or the layer of cells that create the ducts and lobes that produce milk during lactation, were the focus of the study. These cells were taken from non-cancerous tissue donated from the same breast that had malignant tissue removed during a mastectomy by the researchers. The researchers were hunting for a variety of characteristics that could trigger recurrence, but their major aim was the transcriptome, which is the full collection of RNA sequences in a cell that helps control when and where each gene is switched on or off.

Even when surgical procedures improve, invisible microscopic tumor pieces can survive and play a role in breast cancer recurrence in up to 15% of women, often years after surgery; persons with hormone-receptor positive breast cancer are at the highest risk of recurrence.

The researchers discovered dramatically changed RNA in enlarged epithelial cells from women who had chemotherapy prior to surgery. They noticed significant alterations in genes that had previously been identified as cancer prognostic markers.

“When a person is diagnosed with breast cancer,” as explained by Priscilla Furth – corresponding author of the study, “we have several tools, including testing for genes such as BRCA1/2, to decide whether they should get certain kinds of chemotherapy or just receive hormonal therapy. But the tools we have are not as precise as we would like.”

“About one in eight women,” according to the author, “are diagnosed with breast cancer in the developed world. We hope that our findings will help lead to more precise and directed screening in the future, sparing women unneeded procedures as we currently screen almost all women between the ages of 40 to 70, sometimes very aggressively.”

The researchers also mentioned that some of the RNA changes were linked to the production of mammary stem cells, which could have consequences for women who have never had breast cancer. Self-renewing stem cells are linked to growth and development. Adult stem cells that can develop or alter function into specialized mammary epithelial cells are known as mammary stem cells. There is a higher risk of cancer if these cells become dysregulated. The researchers were particularly interested in cells from pregnant women because pregnancy normally causes extra renewing cycles in a cell, potentially raising the risk of cancer.

The conditionally reprogrammed cells (CRC) technology, which was devised and patented at Georgetown, considerably benefited this research endeavor. The epithelial cells in this investigation were isolated using CRC. CRC is the only system that can generate both healthy and cancer cells indefinitely; up to a million new cells can be grown in a week. One of the major challenges in researching these cells before was that epithelial cell cultures were frequently contaminated with other cell types, particularly fibroblasts, which grow rapidly in culture while epithelial cells develop slowly. Primary tumor cells can be difficult to isolate as well, however the researchers found that utilizing the CRC methodology was more successful than using traditional methods.

Image Credit: Getty

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