Discoveries
Study of breast cancer cells finds 'neighbors' play important role in tumor formation
Kornelia Polyak, MD, PhD, is helping shed light on breat cancer growth.
Like young hoodlums in a high-crime area, cancer cells don't escape the harmful effects of their neighborhood. In a recent study, scientists at Dana-Farber found that cells surrounding early breast cancers—the microenvironment—send signals to the tumor cells to grow faster and become more aggressive.
The problem doesn't lie in the makeup of the signals themselves, but in how frequently and strongly they're sent. Such matters are controlled by a molecular switch that turns genes on and off and is the focus of a science known as "epigenetics."
The Dana-Farber study "is the first demonstration that epigenetic events occur in the supportive cells of a tumor, and this further emphasizes that surrounding cells play an active role in cancer formation and growth," says the study's senior author, Kornelia Polyak, MD, PhD. "These changes in the microenvironment may occur before breast duct cells undergo genetic alterations that cause cancer; thus, detecting them may be a means of early cancer diagnosis or even predicting cancer risk."
For the study, Polyak and her colleagues devised a technique, called Methylation Specific Digital Karyotyping, that makes it possible to scan all of a cell's genes to determine which are made overactive by a particular chemical process. Their findings have not only increased scientific understanding of how breast cancers grow, but they could also lead to the discovery of new biomarkers—physical changes that could help detect breast cancers before they're diagnosed by conventional screening methods.
