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July 23rd, 2013 
Australian scientists may have discovered how to determine when breast cancer cells are most vulnerable to chemotherapy, which would be used to kill them off and prevent a relapse.
Source: Supplied
A MEDICAL breakthrough is providing new hope for women whose breast cancer has become resistant to treatment.
Scientists believe they have identified a way of telling when to give patients whose cancer is becoming resistant additional chemotherapy so they can kill off tumour cells early.
They are developing a blood test that can determine when a gene that keeps cells alive is silenced, making cells more vulnerable to chemotherapy.
The research on the BCL-2 gene is likely to help the 70 per cent of breast cancer patients who have oestrogen receptor positive cancer.
Most of these patients respond well to anti-oestrogen treatments but within 15 years half of them will relapse and die from the disease.
Sydney’s Garvan Institute has discovered that the BCL-2 gene is silenced in the tumours that develop resistance to anti-oestrogen treatments like tamoxifen.
They believe this process is detectable in blood, according to new research published in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapies.
When this gene is silenced patients with oestrogen positive breast cancer would benefit from combination therapy where tamoxifen is used in combination with chemotherapy to kill the cancer, they say.
And they say the discovery could be put into practice quickly.
”Excitingly, this is something that could be implemented into clinical practice very quickly since the technology now exists to profile methylation of BCL-2 in all patients – both oestrogen responsive and oestrogen resistant patients,” Garvan Institute’s Professor Susan Clarke said.
“If such a test were to be implemented, we believe it could help patients much earlier – hopefully shutting down tumours at an early stage.”
The next step is to test the findings in a clinical study.
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