Potential New Target for Treating Triple Negative Breast Cancer

(From Science Daily) Scientists believe they may have found a new target for treating triple negative breast cancer — one of the more difficult breast cancers to treat successfully and for which there is no targeted therapy at present.

Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) is a cancer that does not express receptors for oestrogen (ER), progesterone (PR) or the human epidermal growth factor (HER2). It tends to be more aggressive, occurs more often in younger women, and is difficult to treat successfully as it lacks the receptors that currently available targeted therapies such as tamoxifen and trastuzumab (Herceptin) can home in on. Surgery, followed by chemotherapy, is the usual treatment.

Now researchers in Dublin (Ireland) have found that TNBC cells respond to compounds that disrupt the signalling processes of another receptor, EGFR (epidermal growth factor receptor), high levels of which are expressed in TNBC. In a presentation to the 22nd EORTC-NCI-AACR [1] Symposium on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics in Berlin on November 17, Dr Patricia McGowan, a senior postdoctoral scientist at University College Dublin, said the compounds had reduced the growth of TNBC cells in the laboratory by up to 91%.

Read more here: Potential New Target for Treating Triple Negative Breast Cancer Identified