A team of researchers, led by Dr Clare Fedele and Professor Christina Mitchell at Monash University, Australia, has made a significant discovery in breast cancer research that identifies a particular protein’s role in tumour growth. They have also devised a new antibody that can identify the protein and measure its presence in breast cancer tissue.
The protein in question is called inositol polyphosphate 4-phosphatase-II (INPP4B). Earlier research has shown that it exists in breast cancer tissue, but Dr Fedele and the team discovered that the levels of this protein in tumours may be important in determining the severity of the disease. Dr. Fedele said, “We looked at a specific subtype of aggressive breast cancer and found that in about 90 per cent of these types of almost untreatable tumours, INPP4B was gone…This particular subtype of aggressive tumor doesn’t usually respond to treatments such as Tamoxifen. But knowing the correlation between the amount of INPP4B protein and the cancer means we can at least consider treatment alternatives.”
For Dr. Fedele this was a part of her PhD and she added that treatment options were not as simple as increasing the protein saying, “Recreating proteins is scientifically still a little way off. But we are a step closer to identifying how drugs could be designed to specifically target the pathway that is controlled by INPP4B… Understanding why some breast cancers are more aggressive than others will help us develop more effective and personalized treatments in the future.”
She also said that one of the biggest challenges for the research team was to also develop a technology which easily detects and measures the protein and ideally, could be incorporated into existing pathology testing processes. “We created an antibody to INPP4B, which works by specifically detecting the protein in biopsies from breast cancer patient samples,” she said. For the study the team tested on almost 400 human breast cancer tissue samples en over four years.
The finding has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It was conducted at Monash University’s Biomedical Sciences Precinct at the Clayton campus and was supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Cancer Council Victoria. The research collaboration also included work from the Head of the Pathology Board at Monash University and director of Anatomical Pathology at The Alfred Hospital, Prof Catriona McLean, and research teams from the Cancer Council Victoria and The Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney.
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