The discovery could lead to the development of better therapies

Apr 10, 2012 11:46 GMT  ·  By

A collaboration of investigators in the United Kingdom and Canada announce that they were recently able to decode the entire genome of triple negative breast cancer, which is the most dangerous and deadly form this condition can take.

The discovery is very important, since a deeper understanding of how this cancer operates could lead to the development of more effective means of addressing it. At this point, oncologists are fighting a losing battle against this disease.

The team behind the study was made up of scientists from the University of Cambridge and the BC Cancer Agency, in Canada. The UK portion of the team was led by professor Carlos Caldas.

He holds an appointment with the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Research Institute at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. The Canadian section of the group was coordinated by professor Sam Aparicio.

Researchers published details about their genomic analysis in last week's online issue of the top scientific journal Nature. One of the most important discoveries the team made was that this condition was not a single entity.

Instead, triple negative breast cancer is a complex, highly evolved tumor that displays a massive range of mutations, some of which researchers have never seen before. In most respects, these tumors behave like mini ecosystems of sorts, displaying unbelievable complexity.

“As the current work shows, future sequence-guided clinical trials will require collaborations between major cancer centers, such as Cambridge and Vancouver, which are able to recruit the required numbers of patients from an increasingly better defined disease,” says Caldas.

“That is now one of the priorities of the Breast Cancer Program in Cambridge,” adds the expert, a co-leader of the study, and a professor of cancer medicine at the Cambridge Department of Oncology.

Scientists from the University of British Columbia, the Cross Cancer Institute of Alberta and Cancer Research UK were also a part of the research effort. They say that analyzing the particularities of triple negative breast cancer will become easier from now on.

Within a decade or so, we could expect to see a host of new treatments based on these data, they add.