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 therapies are selecting tumors that can grow without estrogen, the mutations also confer a metastatic advantage to the tumor," explains Brown."

I don't like the idea of of the tumor getting an advantage. But they did identify the gene CDK7 is one of the essential ones in the mutation process. Another scientist at Dana-Farber had previously developed an experimental CDK7 inhibitor, THZ1. This now will lead to a clinical trial on this.

"Jeselsohn said that clinical CDK7 inhibitors are being developed, and that "we hope to test these drugs and develop a clinical trial for patients with ER-positive metastatic breast cancer.""

I just want a clinical trial that doesn't take ten years to help women with metastatic breast cancer now.