Individual Trials on Mice Lead to Breakthrough Discovery in Breast Cancer
The mutations of the tumors involved in breast cancer are unique for each person suffering from this disease. Considering the fact that these suffering are similar in the case of mice and humans, scientists from the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy and Duke University Medical Center undertake a research on the little animals in order to acquire knowledge about the mutations of tumors and identify the best treatment for individual human beings.
Treating breast cancer suffering patients with the same therapy is not very effective because, as Doctor Joseph Nevins from Barbara Levine University Professor of Breast Cancer Genomics at Duke says it would be the same as treating a viral infection without even knowing its type whether it is HIV, cold and so on and so forth. His team`s study was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the V Foundation for Cancer Research. People alongside Nevins were: Eran Andrechek, Jeffrey Chang, Michael Gatza, Chaitanya Acharya, Anil Potti from Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, and Robert Cardiff from the Center for Comparative Medicine at the University of California at Davis.
The team of researchers led by Doctor Nevins published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about the experiments done on a huge number of mice suffering from breast cancer. Their tumors were analyzed in part in order to discover what differentiates one mutation from another. As Joseph Nevins states: “The genetic pathways in the tumors determine the sensitivity to drugs. We still have so much to learn about this.”
The scientists bred the tiny animals as to suffer from cancer due to the variation of a Myc gene. In order to increase the diversity of the tumors they dealt with mutations in the Ras gene. Finally, the researchers managed to get the tumors of the mice at the same level with the human ones. Doctor Nevins said: “If we are going to successfully treat a tumor, we must recognize the extensive heterogeneity of what we call breast cancer and match drugs carefully to the characteristics of that particular tumor. Today breast tumors may be sorted by whether they are estrogen-sensitive or HER-2 sensitive, but that is about the extent of it. We are performing human trials to look at the underlying biological pathways and examine how best to match therapies with the individual patient. But, these are lengthy studies. Now we can develop new strategies to match a therapy with a mouse tumor subtype and have results in a much shorter period of time.”
Trials would be undertaken in the case of mice like in the one of people. Scientists first find the tumor, do a biopsy, find out as much as they can about the tumor and then find the most efficient drug in order to treat the illness. Even though the experiments done on mice do not entirely match the actual case in human beings, they are an opportunity to form a treatment strategy.
Doctor Daniel Gallahan, program director for the Integrative Cancer Biology Program at the National Cancer Institute, believes that the trials on mice emphasize the great importance of biological and computational model mechanisms in order to discover the heterogeneity character of human breast cancer. He also states that this study may have as outcome the discovery of an individual treatment for every case of breast cancer tumors.
Doctor Joseph Nevins compares the experiments done on mice tumors with a virtual image composed by pixels. As the scientists examined more and more mice, the picture became clearer and, thus, they were able to gather more information about the tumor mutation patterns and in which way they were different. The key to this process is to conduct the research on mice along with the one on people suffering from cancer. The data which comes to light from the experiments done on mice will come as helpful information in the case of human beings and would advance the trials done on people.
