Discovery Has the Potential To Also Benefit Treatment Choices
Investigators at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center have uncovered genetics and other factors that can predict if a woman is at risk for a recurrence of breast cancer, opening up new research possibilities for preventing the development of a new tumor. The breakthrough was made possible by a cutting-edge technique created at Georgetown Lombardi that allows laboratory researchers to greatly expand, or multiply, difficult-to-extract breast tissue cells.
The finding will be published today (April 22, 2022) in the journal Scientific Reports.
The scientists focused on breast epithelial cells, which are the layer of cells that form the ducts and lobes which make milk during lactation. The researchers extracted these cells from donated non-cancerous tissue in the same breast as the one that had cancerous tissue removed during a mastectomy. The investigators were looking for numerous factors that could kick-start recurrence, but their main target was the entire collection of RNA sequences in a cell — the transcriptome — that helps determine when and where each gene is turned on or off in a cell.
Even though surgical techniques continue to improve, undetectable microscopic pieces of tumor can remain and are one factor for the recurrence of breast cancer in up to 15 percent of women, sometimes years after surgery; people with hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer have the highest risk of recurrence.
RNA Alterations Linked to Recurrence Risk and Prognostic Indicators
When analyzing expanded epithelial cells from women who had chemotherapy before their surgery, the researchers found significantly altered RNA. In particular, they saw significant changes in genes that had previously been recognized as prognostic indicators for cancer.
“When a person is diagnosed with breast cancer, 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,” says Priscilla Furth, M.D., professor of oncology and medicine at Georgetown Lombardi and corresponding author of the study. “About one in eight women 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 noted that there are implications for women who have not had breast cancer as some of the RNA alterations were linked to mammary stem cell formation. Stem cells are self-renewing and related to growth and development. Mammary stem cells are adult stem cells that can differentiate, or change function, into specialized mammary epithelial cells. If these cells get dysregulated, there is an increased potential for cancer. Cells from pregnant women were of particular interest to the researchers as pregnancy usually triggers extra renewing cycles in a cell, potentially increasing the risk of cancer.
Use of CRC Technique to Expand Breast Tissue Cells
This research effort was greatly aided by the conditionally reprogrammed cells (CRC) technique that was invented and patented at Georgetown. This study used CRC for the initial isolation of epithelial cells. CRC is the only known system that can indefinitely grow healthy as well as cancer cells; up to a million new cells can be grown in a week. Heretofore, one of the key problems in studying these cells was that epithelial cell cultures were often contaminated with the other cell types, particularly fibroblasts which grow very quickly in culture while epithelial cells grow a bit slower. Primary tumor cells also can be difficult to isolate but the researchers had increased success using the CRC technique compared to conventional methods.
“Many of our cancer survivors say to me, ‘please do work that will benefit my daughter.’ My response is that’s why I’m in the field of cancer prevention,” says Furth. “Anything we can do to prevent the occurrence or recurrence of cancer is a significant step forward and we think this finding may be an important contribution to reducing misdiagnosis as well as point to ways to develop better therapies to treat the disease.”
Reference: “Characterization of transcriptome diversity and in vitro behavior of primary human high-risk breast cells” by Sahar J. Alothman, Keunsoo Kang, Xuefeng Liu, Ewa Krawczyk, Redha I. Azhar, Rong Hu, David Goerlitz, Bhaskar V. Kallakury and Priscilla A. Furth, 22 April 2022, Scientific Reports.
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-10246-4
In addition to Furth, the other authors from Georgetown include Sahar J. Alothman, Keunsoo Kang, Xuefeng Liu, Ewa Krawczyk, Redha I. Azhar, Rong Hu, David Goerlitz and Bhaskar V. Kallakury.
Georgetown University has an issued patent and pending patent applications on the CRC technology described in this story. Liu is an inventor on the intellectual property. In addition, Georgetown University has licensed the patent rights to a start-up company for commercialization. Liu serves as a consultant to this company, and Georgetown has ownership interest in the company.
Funding includes grants from NCI (RO1CA112176 and P30CA051008) and the King Abdullah Scholarship Program, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
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