Discovery Halts Breast Cancer Stem Cells -- BOSTON, Nov. 26, 2010 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ --
BOSTON, Nov. 26, 2010 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Breast cancer stem cells (CSCs), the aggressive cells thought to be resistant to current anti-cancer therapies and which promote metastasis, are stimulated by estrogen via a pathway that mirrors normal stem cell development. Disrupting the pathway, researchers were able to halt the expansion of breast CSCs, a finding that suggests a new drug therapy target. The study, done in mice, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Early Edition this week.
"A critical aspect of our work was to discover that estrogen could promote breast cancer growth by modulating the proportion of breast CSCs. Since CSCs were not directly sensitive to estrogen, it wasn't clear how estrogen could affect their numbers. However, we found that hormone-sensitive cancer cells can communicate with CSCs to regulate their numbers. By disrupting the interaction between cancer cell populations we were able to prevent tumor growth," said Charlotte Kuperwasser, Ph.D., associate professor in the anatomy and cellular biology and radiation oncology departments at Tufts University School of Medicine, and member of the genetics and cell, molecular & developmental biology program faculties at the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts.
"Interestingly, this signaling pathway involves many of the same players that control normal stem cell biology, raising a more general possibility that CSCs in other tumors might be regulated by the mechanisms guiding normal development," said Kuperwasser.
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