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My Breakthrough
Treatment for Hereditary Breast Cancer
Breakthrough scientists have been instrumental in identifying a potential new drug which could dramatically improve the treatment of patients with certain types of hereditary breast cancer and herald a new approach to targeted cancer therapy. These findings were published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature in April this year.
Why are we interested?
Women carrying faults in the BRCA1 and 2 genes have up to an 85% chance of developing breast cancer by the age of 70. Currently there is no specific treatment available for these women who develop cancer.What have the scientists found?
Now, scientists at the Breakthrough Toby Robins Breast Cancer Research Centre, report that a new drug, known as a PARP* inhibitor, may be very effective in killing tumour cells in people who have faults in BRCA1 and BRCA2. The drug is likely to be much less toxic to healthy cells than standard chemotherapy. This work was also supported by Cancer Research UK and KuDOS Pharmaceuticals.
This is a brand new therapeutic approach, centred on exploiting a specific deficiency in
breast cancer cells.
How does the PARP inhibitor work?
In the UK, nearly 41,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer each year. Most of these are treated with drugs that kill the tumour cells but unfortunately also damage normal cells. It is damage to normal cells that can lead to distressing side effects, like nausea and hair loss. The advantage of this new approach is that it is targeted; tumour cells are killed while normal cells appear unaffected. This is because the PARP inhibitors – designed by KuDOS Pharmaceuticals – exploit the specific genetic make-up of some tumour cells.
Breast tumours in women that inherit faults in either the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes occur because the tumour cells have lost a specific mechanism that repairs damaged DNA. PARP inhibitors selectively kill cells where this form of DNA repair is absent, and so are highly effective in killing BRCA tumour cells. Normal cells are largely unaffected by the drug as they still possess this crucial DNA repair mechanism.
If our laboratory findings are confirmed in the clinic, we could dramatically improve the treatment of patients with BRCA1 or 2 associated
cancers.
What happens next?
The PARP inhibitors will enter Phase I trials within a few months, to monitor the safety of the drug and determine the most effective dose to take into larger clinical trials. If these trials are successful, these drugs will be ready for testing in clinical trials of patients with BRCA tumours.
This new treatment might also be applicable to other forms of breast cancer that behave like BRCA cancer. This group may represent more than 20% of all breast cancers and is a key area of research in Professor Ashworth’s laboratory.
