Thanks to the support of our Curestarters, a team of researchers has identified a molecular signal that could help predict whether early-stage breast cancer might return after radiotherapy. This exciting new finding could one day help doctors identify who will benefit from radiotherapy and who might do better with a different treatment - making it easier to provide more tailored cancer therapies for patients.
If we hadn't had the Worldwide Cancer research support that we've been so lucky to receive, this work would never have been done.
How can we make radiotherapy more effective, for more people?
Hundreds of thousands of patients worldwide currently receive radiotherapy treatment for breast cancer every year. Radiotherapy is particularly effective in early breast cancer, before the tumour has spread. Doctors often use it following surgery, to help clear away any remaining cancer cells. This can help to reduce the chance of cancer coming back.
But radiotherapy is a powerful treatment, and it can come with some serious side effects. It also benefits some more than others. Doctors need new ways to predict who might benefit from radiotherapy, and who could be better off receiving a different type of treatment sooner.
This is the problem that Professor Kairbaan Hodivala-Dilke and her team at Barts Cancer Institute in London have been working to solve. They're particularly interested in a potential indicator of radiotherapy success - a molecular marker called focal adhesion kinase, or FAK. FAK is known to be present in many types of cancer, including breast, bowel, and ovarian cancer.
What have the researchers discovered?
Thanks to our Curestarters, the team were able to join up with researchers in Sweden to study tumour samples from over 800 patients with early-stage breast cancer.
All of these patients had undergone surgery, and some had then been treated with radiotherapy, while others had not.
When the team investigated levels of activated FAK in the samples from these patients, they found evidence that patients with lower levels of activated FAK in their tumour samples seemed to benefit the most from radiotherapy within the first 5 years.
Patients with higher levels of FAK benefitted least from radiotherapy, and their cancer was unfortunately more likely to return within five years of surgery.
What does this mean for breast cancer patients?
If this exciting finding can be expanded on by further research, it suggests that doctors could potentially one day use FAK as part of a range of indicators to predict the best treatment option for patients with early-stage breast cancer. Making sure patients receive the most effective treatment, as early as possible, is vital to ensuring a good treatment outcome.
This finding could therefore one day help to save many more lives from breast cancer, as well as offering vital clues for further research into brand new ways to target cancer with radiotherapy.
Join our united effort to stop cancer.
There are so many different ways to support our search for new cures. Will you join the 90,000+ Curestarters who are already helping us get closer to a day when no life is cut short by cancer?