Fighting the Resistance

Triple-negative breast cancer describes a type of breast cancer that doesn’t have receptors for the hormones oestrogen and progesterone and the protein HER2. As many chemotherapies are directed at these targets, halting this cancer can be more challenging. It's most commonly treated with paclitaxel – a drug that interferes with proteins within the cell cytoskeleton that are important for cell movement and division. Mena is a cytoskeletal protein that can help cancerous cells spread and metastasise – events that ultimately reduce survival rates for cancer patients. Here, researchers found that in mice, triple-negative breast cancer cells with high levels of Mena are paclitaxel resistant (cells pictured unaffected by treatment), suggesting that the amount of Mena in a patient’s cancer cells could help doctors choose the most appropriate treatment. Combining paclitaxel with a drug called tremetanib killed the cells, illustrating a potential treatment solution that could combat resistance in triple-negative breast cancer.

Today is World Cancer Day

Written by Katie Panteli

Katie Panteli

Writer

Katie, a Warwick Biomed graduate, works for a science-publishing house in London with some of the world's most respected scientific minds. She's most interested in human biology, anything and everything that makes us tick.

• Image by Madeleine Julie Oudin
• David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
• Image copyright held by original authors
• Research published in Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, November 2016