Breast cancer

New drug may stop spread of breast cancer

Researchers have identified a new compound that completely halts the spread of metastatic breast cancer in mice.

The vast majority of deaths from cancer result from its progressive spread to vital organs such as the brain and lungs – a process known as metastasis.

In a recent series of studies researchers identified a previously unknown critical role for a potential cancer causing gene, Bcl3, in metastatic breast cancer.

“We showed that suppressing this gene reduced the spread of cancer by more than 80 per cent,” said Dr Richard Clarkson from Cardiff University’s European Cancer Stem Cell Research Institute.

“Our next goal was to then find a way to suppress Bcl3 pharmacologically. Despite great improvements in therapy of early stage breast cancer, the current therapeutic options for patients with late stage metastatic disease are limited.

“There is therefore a clear unmet clinical need to identify new drugs to reverse or at least to slow down disease progression,” he added.

Clarkson and his team joined up with researchers Dr Andrea Brancale and Dr Andrew Westwell from the Cardiff University School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, to develop small chemical inhibitors of the Bcl3 gene.

Computer aided modelling of how the Bcl3 gene functions inside the cell allowed the group to identify a pocket on the surface of Bcl3 essential for its function.
By screening a virtual compound library for chemicals that could fit inside this pocket, using state-of-the-art computer software, they identified a drug candidate that potently inhibits Bcl3.

The compound was then trialled on mice with metastatic disease. The resulting effect was that the drug completely inhibited the development of the mice’s metastatic tumours.
Researchers are now working to conduct clinical trials of the compound. The aim is to develop a therapeutic agent capable of blocking metastatic disease in breast cancer and a variety of tumour types.

Source: Business Standard

Olive oil may help prevent breast cancer

A new study led by an Indian origin researcher has found that a major component of olive oil, hydroxytyrosol, may help prevent breast cancer in postmenopausal women.

“We know there is a correlation between breast density and breast cancer,” Tejal Patel, M.D., breast medical oncologist with Houston Methodist Cancer Center said. “A decrease in density of one percent can potentially translate into a nearly two percent reduced risk of developing breast cancer.

Previous research has shown that olive oil provides many health benefits including lowering the risk for heart disease, high blood pressure and possibly stroke.

Houston Methodist will enroll 100 patients — 50 premenopausal and 50 postmenopausal women. Each patient will take one 25 mg hydroxytyrosol capsule for 12 months and undergo checkups every three months. There is no placebo control.

In addition to looking at whether hydroxytyrosol has an impact on breast density, researchers will also note possible side effects of the chemical.

Source: DNA India

Large amounts of folic acid could lead to development of breast cancer

A scientist shown for the first time that folic acid supplements in doses 2.5 to five times the daily requirement “significantly promotes” the growth of existing pre-cancerous or cancerous cells in the mammary glands of rats.

Dr. Young-In Kim said that this is a critically important issue because breast cancer patients and survivors in North America are exposed to high levels of folic acid through folic acid fortification in food and widespread use of vitamin supplements after a cancer diagnosis.

The amount of folic acid consumed in North America has increased dramatically in the past 15 years. Women are routinely advised to take folic acid supplements before becoming pregnant and while pregnant to prevent neural tube birth defects such as spina bifida.

His research was published in the online journal PLOS ONE.

Source: healcon

Biocon to start selling breast cancer drug in India in February

Biocon Ltd said its generic version of Roche’s Herceptin breast cancer treatment would be available to patients in India from the first week of February.

Bangalore-based Biocon jointly developed biosimilar trastuzumab, which received the Indian drug regulator’s marketing approval in November, with U.S.-based Mylan Inc.

About 150,000 people are diagnosed with breast cancer every year in India, of which 25 percent are eligible for treatment with trastuzumab, Biocon said.

Roche decided not to pursue a patent application for its breast cancer drug Herceptin in India, paving the way for generic drugmakers to produce cheaper copies, known as biosimilars because they are not identical to the original drug.

Global sales for Herceptin were valued at about $6.4 billion in 2012, including about $21 million in India, Biocon said.

Source: Reuters

Stem cell breakthrough explains how breast cancer spreads

Breast cancer stem cells exist in two different states and each state plays a role in how cancer spreads, a new study has revealed.

Study’s senior author Max S. Wicha from University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center said the lethal part of cancer is its metastasis so understanding how metastasis occurs is critical.

“We have evidence that cancer stem cells are responsible for metastasis – they are the seeds that mediate cancer’s spread. Now we’ve discovered how the stem cells do this,” Wicha said.

First, on the outside of the tumor, a type of stem cell exists in a state called the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) state. These stem cells appear dormant but are very invasive and able to get into the bloodstream, where they travel to distant parts of the body.

Once there, the stem cells transition to a second state that displays the opposite characteristics, called the mesenchymal-epithelial transition state (MET). These cells are capable of growing and making copies of themselves, producing new tumors.

The study looked specifically at breast cancer stem cells but the researchers believe the findings likely have implications for other cancer types as well.

The study was published in the journal of Stem Cell Reports.

Source: ANI

 

Diet and exercise: cancer benefits in huge study of women’s health

In a large study of women’s health, postmenopausal women who followed a healthy lifestyle were at a third lower risk of death, including a 20% smaller chance of dying from cancer, than women who did not follow guidance on diet, weight, physical activity, and alcohol intake.

“While it is well recognized that tobacco cessation is the lead behavioral change to reduce cancer risk,” the authors write, they analyzed the effect of other cancer prevention recommendations.

The researchers used data gathered by the observational study in the women’s health initiative of the US National Institutes of Health, which was launched in 1992 with a $140 million, 15-year contract: “the largest coordinated study of women’s health ever undertaken.”

Cynthia Thomson PhD and her colleagues analyzed data from 65,838 postmenopausal women age between 50 and 79 years.

The participants were enrolled in the women’s health initiative between 1993 and 1998 at 40 clinical centers across the country, and the team’s analysis represents the “largest study of postmenopausal women in the US.”

Those women who adhered most to lifestyle recommendations had a 22% lower risk for breast cancer and a 52% lower risk for colorectal cancer, compared with women who did not closely follow guidance.

The recommendations being followed were the American Cancer Society (ACS) guidelines on nutrition and physical activity, which have four central planks:

“Achieve and maintain a healthy weight throughout life”
“Be physically active”
“Eat a healthy diet, with an emphasis on plant foods”
“If you drink alcohol, limit your intake.”
Dr. Thomson, professor of public health at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona in Tucson, says:

“The message is simple and clear: If you want to reduce your risk for cancer, even later in life, eat a healthy diet, be active daily, avoid or limit alcohol, and don’t smoke.”

“Our results support the ACS guidelines for cancer prevention,” Thomson adds, but she calls for more support for other factors that can reduce the risks further, “because diet and activity alone do not account for the majority of risk.”

The researchers scored women’s adherence to the lifestyle advice on cancer prevention.

Zeroes were given for “behaviors least consistent with the recommendations” and scores of one or two were given for healthy lifestyle actions, adding these up to a maximum level of compliance represented by a total score of eight.

Most of the women in the study had final scores between three and six. Fewer than 1% of the women scored eight after following all of the recommended lifestyle choices.

Analysis of almost 9,000 cancers
Data on the women were collected over an average of 8.3 years, a period that witnessed the diagnosis of 8,632 cancers and 2,356 cancer-related deaths.

The women whose lifestyles were rated the healthiest (a score of seven or eight) showed a lower risk of overall cancer compared with those given low scores (from zero to two).

This included a reduction by a fifth in their risk for breast cancer, and by half for colorectal cancer.

The healthier lifestyles were also associated with a lower risk of death from other causes not related to cancer.

The authors note that guidelines for healthy lifestyle in the prevention of cancer have been based on evidence from few such prospectively identified associations.

The researchers’ conclusions are drawn from the women’s health initiative, which was a study designed at the outset to track future health changes over time.

Such prospective studies result in comparisons that are controlled and more reliable than can be drawn retrospectively, by looking back on data that was not collected for the purpose.

Lifestyle effect was greater in some groups of women
The analysis found an even lower incidence of cancers and lower overall death rate among women from certain ethnic groups as a result of the lifestyle measures, and the paper calls for more research into this difference.

Dr. Thomson says:

“We found that the association was stronger for Asian, African-American, and Hispanic women, compared with non-Hispanic white women.

It is possible that different ethnic groups may have differential disease course with varied response to environmental and/or behavioral exposures.”

Source: medical news today

Low oxygen bad for breast cancer patients

Breast cancer cells, when exposed to low oxygen conditions, trigger the production of two proteins that make the cancer cells spread fast — making the patient’s condition worse, a new paper has contended.

Researchers at The Johns Hopkins University reached the conclusion that low oxygen conditions, frequently present in breast cancers, facilitates the production of RhoA and ROCK1 proteins that, in turn, endow the cancer cells with the ability to move.

“High levels of RhoA and ROCK1 were known to worsen outcomes for breast cancer patients by endowing cancer cells with the ability to move, but the trigger for their production was a mystery,” said Gregg Semenza, Professor of Medicine at The Johns Hopkins University.

The researchers found that women with high levels of RhoA or ROCK1, and especially those women with high levels of both, were more likely to die of breast cancer than those with low levels.

“We now know that the production of these proteins increases dramatically when breast cancer cells are exposed to low oxygen conditions,” said the paper, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

With the multiplying of tumour cells, the interior of the tumour begins to run out of oxygen simply because they are not being supplied by blood vessels.

“The lack of oxygen activates the hypoxia-inducible factors, which are master control proteins that switch on many genes that help cells adapt to the scarcity of oxygen,” explained Semenza.

Hypoxia refers to a condition in which the body or a part of the body is deprived of adequate supply of oxygen.

Hypoxia-inducible factors also turn on genes that help cancer cells escape from the oxygen-starved tumour by invading blood vessels, through which they spread to other parts of the body, the paper added.

Here is a breather, though.

“We have successfully decreased the mobility of breast cancer cells in the lab by using genetic tricks to knock the hypoxia-inducible factors down,” said Daniele Gilkes, lead author of the paper.

“Now that we understand the mechanism at play, we hope that clinical trials will be performed to test whether drugs that inhibit hypoxia-inducible factors will have the double effect of blocking production of RhoA and ROCK1 and preventing metastases in women with breast cancer,” Gilkes added.

Source: Pak tribune

Cancer deaths rise to 8.2 million, breast cancer sharply up

The global death toll from cancer rose to 8.2 million in 2012 with sharp rises in breast cancer as the disease tightened its grip in developing nations struggling to treat an illness driven by Western lifestyles.

Cancer deaths were up 8 percent from 7.6 million in a previous survey in 2008 and breast cancer killed 522,000 women last year, up 14 percent in the same period, according to the World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).

“Breast cancer is also a leading cause of cancer death in the less developed countries of the world,” said David Forman, head of IARC’s Section of Cancer Information, the group that compiles the global cancer data.

He said this was “partly because a shift in lifestyles is causing an increase in incidence, and partly because clinical advances to combat the disease are not reaching women living in these regions.”

An estimated 14.1 million people developed cancer in 2012, up from 12.7 million in 2008. And 1.7 million women were newly diagnosed with breast cancer last year, up by more than 20 percent from 2008.

IARC’s report, called GLOBOCAN 2012, gives the most up-to-date estimates for 28 different types of cancer in 184 countries and offers an overview of the global cancer burden.

It found that the most commonly diagnosed cancers worldwide in men and women combined were lung, breast and colorectal cancers. The most common causes of cancer death were lung, liver and stomach cancers.

SUBSTANTIVE INCREASE

Projecting forward, IARC experts said they expected “a substantive increase” in cancer cases worldwide, with annual new cases predicted to rise to 19.3 million by 2025 as the global population both grows and ages.

Worldwide trends show that in developing countries going through rapid societal and economic change, the shift towards lifestyles more typical of richer industrialized countries leads to a rising burden of cancers linked to reproduction, diet and hormones.

The IARC report said cancer incidence – the number of new cases each year – has been increasing in most regions of the world, but noted what it said were “huge inequalities” between rich and poor countries.

While rates of new cancer cases are still highest in more developed regions, death rates are relatively much higher in less developed countries because people’s tumors are often not detected and diagnosed early enough due to a lack of screening and access to treatment.

“An urgent need in cancer control today is to develop effective and affordable approaches to the early detection, diagnosis, and treatment of breast cancer among women living in less developed countries,” said Christopher Wild, IARC’s director.

He said it was critical to bring rates of disease and death in poorer countries in line with progress made in recent years in treating and curing some cancers on wealthier countries.

One stark example of the inequality is in cervical cancer – which kills hundreds of thousands of women in Africa each year but can be largely avoided with a vaccine or successfully treated if it is picked up early enough with screening.

In sub-Saharan Africa, 34.8 new cases of cervical cancer are diagnosed per 100,000 women each year, and 22.5 per 100,000 women die from the disease. That compares with 6.6 and 2.5 per 100,000 women respectively in North America.

“These findings bring into sharp focus the need to implement the tools already available for cervical cancer, notably HPV vaccination combined with well organized national programs for screening and treatment,” Wild said.

Source: reuters

Negative results may ‘not always’ imply reduced breast cancer risk

A new study has found that women who are members of families with BRCA2 mutations but who test negative for the family-specific BRCA2 mutations are still at greater risk for developing breast cancer compared with women in the general population.

Women with certain mutations in their BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes are at increased risk for breast cancer. However, the study suggested that it may not always be true.

“We found that women who test negative for family-specific BRCA2 mutations have more than four times the risk for developing breast cancer than the general population,” Gareth R. Evans from University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, said. “We also found that any increased risk for breast cancer is largely limited to BRCA2 families with strong family history and other genetic factors.

Evans said that it is likely that these women inherit genetic factors other than BRCA-related genes that increase their breast cancer risk. About 77 single nucleotide polymorphisms are linked to breast cancer risk.

He said that identification of additional SNPs is necessary to understand why some of the BRCA-negative women from BRCA families are at higher risk.

The authors noted that specialists should use caution when stating that a woman’s breast cancer risk is the same as that of the general population following a negative test, because it may not be true for some women who come from BRCA2 families with a strong family history.

The study is published in journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.

Source: ANI

Plant Nutrient ‘Cocktail’ Kills Breast Cancer Cells

A new study finds a cocktail of compounds found naturally in plants killed all of the breast cancer cells collected in a laboratory, without any toxic side effects on normal cells.

Researchers at Louisiana State University tested six known protective chemical nutrients from turmeric, soybeans, broccoli, grapes and tea. Individually, they were ineffective against cancer.

But combined, they suppressed breast cancer cell growth in the lab by more than 80 percent, and eventually triggered the process leading to cell death.

The next step for the scientists is to see whether the compounds can prevent tumor formation and growth in mice.

Dr. Madhwa Raj, who led the study published in the Journal of Cancer, points out that all the ingredients in the cocktail come from foods people eat every day, but at much higher levels than they could possibly get from their diet.

Because he “really believes it can help women now,” he has established a bio-tech start-up company to bring the super-cocktail to market as a nutritional supplement for breast health, which does not require approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

Source: Voice of America