Drug-resistance breast cancer genes discovered

Every year over a million women are diagnosed with breast cancer around the world and, though 80 per cent receive treatment to help them beat the disease, one in five do not survive beyond five years.

Though a portion of this minority do not survive because their cancer was diagnosed too late, many women die because their body became immune to the drugs used to treat the condition, but experts in the US believe they may have found an answer for this.

Researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at the University of Boston have discovered a gene activity signature which can predict a high risk of cancer recurrence in certain breast tumours that have been treated with chemotherapy drugs.

The experts claim that the findings could result in healthcare experts prescribing a more tailored form of treatment to sufferers who have undergone surgery which reduces their chances of having toxic side-effects.

Writing in the online journal Nature Medicine, lead investigators Dr Andrea Richardson and Dr Zhigang Charles Wang spotted that an area of a chromosome on a breast cancer tumour is resistant to the chemotherapy drugs used after treatment.

"This was the only region of the genome that was tightly associated with poor outcomes despite the adjuvant chemotherapy treatment," Dr Wang wrote.

According to the specialist, eliminating the function of the LAPTM4B and YWHAZ genes, which are both found in that area, can enable cancer drugs to have a more marked effect.

Dr Richardson concluded that the discovery may enable more personalised cancer treatment, which could help to reduce mortality rates.

Posted by James McCann

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