Scientists discover predictive marker for classifying patients with breast cancer for effective treatment -
A predictive marker discovered by scientists from A * STAR and NUS could help physicians classify patients with breast cancer for more effective treatment
scientists have made it easier to predict relapse and breast cancer response to chemotherapy, through the identification of a single gene. The newly found marker could help doctors classify each breast cancer patient and customize a treatment plan that is most effective. The discovery was a collaborative effort by scientists from the Institute of A * STAR Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) and the Singapore Cancer Science Institute (CSI Singapore) at the National University of Singapore (NUS ).
Despite advances in cancer treatment, breast cancer remains the most common cancer among women in Singapore. Thirty percent of patients with early breast cancer in the world experience due to metastatic relapse, or the spread of cancer cells to other organs. Some patients do not respond well to chemotherapy. The inability to predict relapse or effectiveness of chemotherapy resulted in an urgent need to identify predictive markers that doctors can use to adapt the appropriate treatment for each patient with breast cancer at an early stage.
In a study recently published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation , a high-level journal for discoveries in basic and clinical biomedical research, the team of scientists co-led by Dr. Vinay Tergaonkar, principal investigator at IMCB and Dr. Alan Prem Kumar, senior partner at CSI Singapore and Assistant Professor in the Department of pharmacology, NUS Yong Loo Lin school of medicine, discovered a gene, DP103, which is active in metastatic breast cancer. DP103 acts as a master controller, which expresses two sets of unfavorable protein - this leads to metastasis and causes other patients to be insensitive to chemotherapy. Therefore, physicians can predict the likelihood of metastases by examining the DP103 levels in patients with breast cancer. The same gene may also be used to predict whether a patient will respond to chemotherapy.
"The doctors are unable to tell if a patient with breast cancer will respond to chemotherapy up to six months after treatment has been prescribed. It is very disturbing that those who are not sensitive to chemotherapy usually also suffer relapses due to metastasis. This DP103 gene that we found explains the link and facilitate doctors in selecting appropriate treatments for individual breast cancer cases, "said Dr. Tergaonkar.
In addition, the study found that reducing levels of DP103 could contain cancer, shrink the tumor and make them more favorable to chemotherapy patients. All results of the study have been validated with samples from patients with breast cancer Singapore, Canada, China and the United States.
"DP103 is a novel biomarker that could help doctors select the appropriate treatment for patients with breast cancer at an early stage. It is also a therapeutic target that could be explored further to develop drugs that suppress breast cancer growth and metastasis, "said Dr. Kumar, who discovered the oncogenic potential of DP103 to drive breast cancer metastasis. He is the principal inventor on a patent application on this discovery and is currently studying ways to regulate the levels of DP103 in a variety of cancer types CSI Singapore.
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