Surprise discovery of unknown breast cancer genes could revolutionise treatment

Three key breast cancer genes have been pinpointed by British scientists in a breakthrough likened to finding gold in Trafalgar Square.
The discovery could save thousands of lives a year by providing researchers with the inspiration they need to come up with vital new treatments for the most common form of the disease.
Excitingly, and despite the preliminary nature of the research, the first new drugs could be available in as little as five years.
Crucially, the new medicines would attack the cancer in a different way to existing treatments, meaning they should work where current therapies fail, saving some of the 1,000 lives a month lost to the disease in the UK alone.
The potential implications of the genes – and the surprising place in which they were found – has led the researchers to liken their discovery to stumbling across a chest of gold on the well-trodden paving slabs of Trafalgar Square.
During the five-year study, the researchers who were part-funded by the NHS and the charity Breakthrough Breast Cancer, studied the DNA of 104 breast cancer patients, including many Britons.
All of the women studied had something known as oestrogen receptor-positive breast cancer, which accounts for four in five of all breast tumours and is also to blame for the bulk of the 12,000 lives lost to the disease a year.
It got its name because oestrogen ‘feeds’ and fuels the tumour by latching onto proteins on the surface of cancer cells known as receptors.
Many existing treatments, including tamoxifen, the most widely-used breast cancer drug, work by cutting off this oestrogen supply.
But tumours frequently become resistant to treatment, allowing the cancer to return after surgery or spread throughout the body - with potentially fatal consequences.
The sex hormone’s key role in the process means that the genetics of the oestrogen receptor have been intensively studied for decades.
So, the researchers, from the Breakthrough Breast Cancer Research Centre at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, were stunned to find the DNA near it harboured three previously unknown genes.
Dr Anita Dunbier, the study’s author, said: ‘We found the genes in a place we thought we knew a lot about – it is like finding gold in Trafalgar Square.
‘It seemed too obvious to be true. We had to check things very thoroughly to make sure it wasn’t just a false discovery.
‘We now have to look further at how these genes work but the discovery could lead to possible new therapies that will benefit women with breast cancer in the near future.’
Importantly, despite the genes’ proximity to the oestrogen receptor, they work separately from it.
This means that new treatments could work where existing ones fail.
Dr Dunbier said: ‘What we hope to do is unlock the door to more treatment options.’

Creating new drugs from scratch can take years but the research team hope to speed up the process by testing medicines that are already on the market for other illnesses.
Researcher Professor Mitch Dowsett said: ‘This research is exciting because it shows that while the oestrogen receptor is the main driver of hormonal breast cancer, there are others next door to it that also appear to influence breast cancer behaviour.
‘We now need to better understand how they work together and how we can utilise them to save lives of women with breast cancer.’
Breast cancer is Britain’s most common form of the disease, with one in eight women diagnosed with it during their lifetime, and rates are on the rise.
Almost 50,000 women a year are diagnosed with breast cancer and 1,000 a month die.