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Hope for new targeted breast cancer medicine

By Cai Wenjun | October 21, 2014, Tuesday | Online Edition

Local scientists identified a novel stem cell in the breast and said the cell can serve as a target for a type of the breast cancer, which has no targeted medicine so far.

Breast cancer is the top female cancer for women in China and the world. There are over 160,000 new cases of breast cancer in China, which covers 12 percent of all global cases every year.

So far, there are four types of breast cancer including one type covering 20 percent of breast cancer patients, whose disease mechanism still remained unknown and failed to response to the current therapy.

Patients with such type of breast cancer have the highest rate of cancer cell transfer and the lowest three-year survival rate, experts said yesterday.

To study the cell origins of breast cancer, a team led by Zeng Yi from the Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology/State Key Laboratory of Cell Biology, decided to look for multipotent stem cells in breast and planned to use such cells as a tool to study the type of breast cancer that has no treatment.

“Different from other cancer study that people study the cancer itself, we decided to start from its cell origin to find the answer and how the cancer grows,” Zeng said. “Multipotent stem cells should exist in all organs of human, but scientists in the world haven’t found such cells in breast in previous studies.”

The team successfully found such stem cells, which have Protein C receptor expression at the cell surface.

“This finding has important applications for our understanding of breast cancer. It also has been speculated that the type of breast cancer currently lack of targeted medicine is originated from the stem cell,” she said. “So the receptor found in our research can not only serves as a marker for the stem cell identity but also likely be a therapeutic target for this type of breast cancer.”

Scientists said they have teamed up with doctors from the Cancer Hospital of Fudan University to work out diagnosis kit and targeted therapy in clinical use.

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