An international team of researchers has developed a way to better prevent a possible early-stage breast cancer from becoming an invasive one.
This was announced, in a statement issued on Tuesday, by the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology, VIB, which collaborated in the research.
The researchers studied the growth of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), a precursor stage of breast cancer.
DCIS consists of abnormal cells in the milk ducts of the breast. In Belgium, it is detected in about 2,000 of the 10,000 annual examinations by the presence of calcium spatters visible on a mammogram. These are an indication of DCIS.
So far, however, it is not possible to predict which DCIS will develop into breast cancer. For this reason, virtually all women with DCIS are treated preventively with mastectomy or breast-conserving surgery, followed by radiotherapy and sometimes hormonal treatment.
To avoid this potentially unnecessary intervention in the future, the researchers have built up a DCIS biobank to gain a better understanding of their progression to cancer. To do this, the researchers extracted DCIS cells from the human tissue of women and placed them in the milk ducts of mice. The growth of the various DCIS abnormalities, which were very different from one another, was then observed for a year.
Just under half of the mice developed invasive mammary tumours.
The molecular study revealed that the presence of the HER2 protein increases the risk of breast cancer. Three-dimensional microscopy, on the other hand, showed that human iPSC cells have two different growth patterns.
In most of the mice that did not develop breast cancer, DCIS cells replaced the mouse cells in the milk ducts.
Conversely, breast cancer developed when the milk ducts became “swollen,” upon contact with the DCIS cells.
