2023-05-17 17:00:00
Where does breast cancer actually come from, what is the trigger or driver for the pathological change in cells? Researchers have now found out at what cell stage the pathological change in cells begins and what could help to prevent the conversion of healthy cells into pathological ones. And estrogen plays a much more far-reaching role than previously thought. Until now, the hormone has been considered a catalyst for cancer growth because it stimulates the division and cell proliferation of breast tissue, a process that carries the risk of cancer-causing mutations.
The role of the hormone estrogen
However, researchers have now discovered that the effect of the hormone begins much earlier. Namely where cell division goes wrong. When cells divide, genetic information is copied. If something goes wrong with the DNA copy, chromosomes in a cell can be sorted incorrectly and dormant cancer genes can be activated. During the next cell division, the broken chromosome is then stretched between the two new cells like a bridge, which, however, breaks easily. When that happens, the cancer genes are released and allowed to multiply.
However, these gene mutation patterns do not occur in all cancer diagnoses; A research team from Harvard Medical School (Boston/USA) took a closer look at exactly such cases and, after analyzing the genome of 780 patients, determined that there is a completely different, complex mechanism here that sets the cancer in motion. Experiments in the Petri dish with cells modified with the CRSPR gene scissors and exposed to estrogen clearly showed that where estrogen comes into play, the way cells repair their chromosomes changes. In this way, the cancer is not only triggered by the increased formation of diseased cells that the estrogen has stimulated. Estrogen causes DNA to get mixed up and chromosomes to be repaired incorrectly beforehand.
What is that good for?
But what good is such knowledge at the molecular level? There are already estrogen drugs that reduce breast cell proliferation. The research now presented shows that these drugs can do much more: they can also prevent estrogen from triggering carcinogenic genomic rearrangements in the cells. Breast cancer tests could become more accurate if the analysis looks at the chromosome arrangement. If chromosome rearrangements are discovered, this would be an indication of breast cancer coming back.
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