2024-04-14 03:50:31
Fighting a protein helps to treat and shrink breast cancer tumors! The discovery was made by scientists from the British Imperial College, led by the Greek postdoctoral researcher Giorgos Giamas. As they found, if they block this particular protein, called LMTK3, they make hormone therapy more effective against hormone-dependent cancer. In five to ten years they hope to create a new generation of drugs that achieve this effect.
In fact, as Dr. Yamas explains, this protein that favors cancer seems to have been acquired by humans at some point in their evolutionary path, differentiating from apes. And that’s because, comparing us to chimpanzees, she noticed that they don’t have her gene, so they don’t succumb to hormone-dependent breast cancer.
This is the form of breast cancer that uses estrogen to grow and for which doctors usually give hormone therapy with an antiestrogen, such as tamoxifen. However, cancer patients develop resistance to hormones, as a result of which they cease to be effective. With their research, scientists from Imperial seem to have solved this basic problem:
By genetically blocking the production of the protein in mice, they were able to make the cancer respond to treatment again and the cancerous tumors to shrink significantly. They also confirmed the link of LMTK3 to cancer in human tissue samples in the laboratory. In other words, they found that cancer patients with higher levels of the protein lived less and had a lower response to hormone therapy. According to Professor Justin Stebbing, supervisor of Dr. Yama’s group, they are now looking for drugs that will succeed in blocking the protein, as they have done genetically in the laboratory.
The Greek researcher Giorgos Giamas received a bachelor’s degree from the Biology department of the University of Athens and a PhD from the German University of Ulm, while at Imperial he works as a postdoctoral researcher in the biology of breast cancer.
Myrto Butsis
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