Treatment Resistance Breast Cancer

Most breast cancers are hormone receptor positive or (ER+) and are treated with multiple therapies including chemotherapy and hormone therapies including tamoxifen and aromatase inhibitors. But the problem is then that after they metastasize,  a third of them become resistance to treatment and will cause your demise." Such endocrine therapies, including tamoxifen and aromatase inhibitor drugs, can prevent recurrence of early breast cancer, and can slow the progression of metastatic disease. However, in about one-third of patients with metastatic ER-positive breast cancer, treatment with endocrine therapies leads to the emergence of tumor cells that grow even in the absence of estrogen hormone, resulting in treatment-resistant disease that is often incurable. "Isn ' t that ' awesome ' ? If you have metastatic breast cancer and are treated with an endocrine therapy you have a 1 in 3 chance that its not going to cure your cancer - and you have no way of knowing if you are or not. However reesearch has been going on at Dana-Farber on this very topic." In the new report, however, the Dana-Farber scientists revealed another previously unknown effect of three of the mutations in the ER gene. That is, the mutations not only cause resistance to estrogen blockade, but also turn on genes that drive the breast tumors to metastasize to other organs. This kind of unexpected additional action of a mutated gene is termed " neomorphic. "" That tells us that even though the drug ther...
Source: Caroline's Breast Cancer Blog - Category: Cancer & Oncology Tags: breast cancer treatment cancer research clinical trials metastatic cancer Source Type: blogs