Health - Canadian research alters view of breast tumours

CBC News - Health - B.C. research alters view of breast tumours

Not all cells in a breast cancer tumour contain the same mutations, researchers in British Columbia have found.

The finding that changes occur in tumours over time could change how scientists think about developing new breast cancer drugs and deciding which patients would benefit most from treatments.

In Wednesday's issue of the journal Nature, Samuel Aparicio and his colleagues at the BC Cancer Agency charted the genetic mutations that occurred in the 3 billion letters of the DNA sequence from an estrogen-receptor-alpha-positive breast tumour.

"The impact is going to be in the way that cancer researchers look at developing therapies and applying therapies in the short term," said Aparicio, chair of breast cancer research at the BC Cancer Agency and Canada research chair in molecular oncology.

"Over the long term, we hope that being able to decode the sequence of tumours on a routine basis will eventually lead us to being able to better predict which combinations of medicines to use when treating a cancer. We're not quite at that point yet."

The team found 32 mutations after it had spread, nine years after the original biopsy of the lobular breast cancer, which accounts for eight to 15 per cent of all breast cancers, Aparicio said.


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