5 Things We Learned About Breast Cancer In 2014

As the end of the year approaches, we thought it would be a good idea to look back on 2014 and outline the breast cancer breakthroughs that we thought were significant.

1. A New Hope

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Drugs which are used to treat breast cancer are being repurposed to prevent women getting the disease in the first place. Results from a clinical trial, called IBIS II, showed that a drug called Anastrozole can reduce the risk of breast cancer in post-menopausal women who are at high risk of the disease. This was mainly women who have a family history of breast cancer or had previously been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. This drug is normally used to treat women once they have been diagnosed with breast cancer, so it’s interesting that the same drug can also prevent the cancer forming in the first place.

2. One Small Step

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When breast cancer spreads to other organs, it becomes secondary breast cancer, and life threatening. The challenge in the clinic is that these new tumours are very different from the original, or primary tumour, and this can make it difficult to select the right treatment. This can partially solved by taking a sample of the tumour from a patient but with multiple tumours across different organs it can prove a real challenge. We know now that dying tumour cells release their DNA and this genetic material can be detected in the blood of patients with a painless test. This year we have seen some big advances in how this tumour DNA can be detected in a blood sample and used to assess the genetics of a patient’s cancer when it has spread. This could be an extremely powerful tool to make sure that doctors keep one step ahead of the disease and move patients on to the best possible treatment at the right time.

3. The Drugs Do Work

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Improving survival for patients with secondary breast cancer is one of the big aims for research. Clinical trial results published this year showed that combining the targeted treatments Herceptin and Perjeta with chemotherapy could significantly improve survival for these patients. The study lead, Dr Sandra Swain, said: “The survival improvement of nearly 16 months … is unprecedented among studies of metastatic breast cancer”. Unfortunately, Perjeta was one of the breast cancer drugs rejected by NICE for recommendation on the NHS, so patients in England can’t get access to it. This isn’t the only one either. Kadcyla, another great drug for secondary breast cancer, was also rejected. In the UK, campaigns such as #DemandAFairPrice are working to fix the growing gap between effective breast cancer treatments and cost.

4. It's Complex, Jim

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We’ve known for a while that tumours aren’t made up of identical cancer cells, but groups of cancer cells with very different genetic backgrounds. This is called heterogeneity and is responsible for tumours showing resistance to certain treatments. This year, researchers in the USA developed a new technique to capture and analyse individual cancer cells floating in the blood of breast cancer patients. Remarkably, they showed that no two cells were genetically identical, revealing a complexity never before seen. The powerful tool they have developed for sequencing single tumour cells could be used to study the genetics of individual tumour cells present in a patient’s blood stream – helping to characterise the heterogeneity of a patient’s cancer and potentially leading to better ways of treating the disease.

5. Uncontrollable Urge

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A key feature of cancer cells is their ability to grow and divide uncontrollably. To do this the cells need to go through a process called ‘centrosome clustering’ to ensure that genetic material is shared evenly across new cells during cell division. This year, scientists proved for the first time that a group of proteins known as the ‘cyclosome’ plays a vital role in enabling cancer cells to divide successfully. This complex could therefore be targeted with drugs to prevent cancerous cells from dividing. The study leader, Dr Spiros Linardopoulos, said that “inhibiting this process could hold the key to a raft of new, targeted treatment opportunities”.