Cancer cells often travel throughout the body and cause new tumors in individuals with advanced breast cancer – a process called metastasis – commonly resulting in malignant bone tumors. What the Princeton research has uncovered is the exact mechanism that lets the traveling tumor cells disrupt normal bone growth. By zeroing in on the molecules involved, and particularly a protein called “Jagged1” that sends destructive signals to cells, the research team has opened the door to drug therapies that could block this disruptive process. Doctors at other medical centers who have reviewed the research have found it promising.
“Right now we don’t have many treatments to offer these patients,” said Yibin Kang, an associate professor of molecular biology at Princeton who led the research team. “Doctors can manage the symptoms of this bone cancer, but they can’t do much more. Our findings suggest there could be a new way of treatment,” one that could slow or halt these bone tumors.
Breast cancer spreads to the bone in 70 to 80 percent of patients with advanced breast cancer, and it can also spread to the brain, lung and liver. Metastatic bone cancer is also a frequent occurrence among patients with advanced prostate, lung and skin cancers. In findings that were published online in the journal Cancer Cell, the team’s research shows that breast tumor cells are able to give bone cells the wrong instructions through a process known as cell signaling – with disastrous effects for the patient.
The billions of cells in a living human body must communicate to develop, repair tissue, and effectively maintain normal physiological functions. Cell signaling is part of a complex system that enables them to do that but, in patients with cancer, the relationship between signaling molecules and the molecules that communicate with them has gone awry.
Signaling molecules are those that can be received and read by a cell through a receptor molecule on its surface. Once the signaling molecules connect with a receptor, their union sets off a process that leads to the receiving cell changing its behavior. The sequence of events that follows involves a signaling pathway, which is a group of molecules that work together, one molecule activating the next until a specific function is carried out, such as renewing an organ’s cells. There are many such signaling pathways.
But in the case of metastatic breast cancer, a disruptive pathway is formed. The signaling molecule, also known as a ligand, connects with a receptor molecule on certain bone cells and activates a cellular pathway that ultimately disrupts healthy bone renewal. Kang’s team identified the signaling molecule as Jagged1, and the receptor molecule as one that activates a cellular pathway known as the “Notch pathway.”
This finding gives cancer researchers a specific target, Kang said – that of developing ways “to neutralize Jagged1’s destructive power” and keeping it from interfering with normal bone growth.
At the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, Jacqueline Bromberg, a physician who also studies breast cancer, said the findings of Kang’s team are promising.
“The bone is the most common site for metastasis in patients with breast cancer,” said Bromberg, who met Kang several years ago while he was a postdoctoral fellow at Sloan Kettering. She noted that although there are treatments that can slow these tumors, such as estrogen-blockers, radiation and chemotherapy, “we have few therapies which effectively eradicate bone metastasis.”
At the University of Indiana School of Medicine in Indianapolis, oncology professor Theresa Guise said the Princeton discoveries “show critical interactions between the tumor cells and bone cells.” She added that the team has made a valuable contribution to research in that it “has dissected the contribution of the tumor and the micro-environment in this process.”
Source: Emily Aronson
Princeton University