What's new in breast cancer research?

Dr Greta Varchi, National Research Council, Italy:

“Breast cancer makes me think of Hydra, the gigantic mythical monster with nine heads. Each time a discovery seems to be the key to curing patients, new evidence indicates that we are still far from the solution.

“In the past decades, enormous progress has been made regarding early diagnosis and enhancing breast cancer patient care, leading to reduced morbidity and mortality. Nonetheless, several critical challenges remain.

“For example, conventional chemotherapy is almost ineffective against dormant cancer cells, which are responsible for the spread of cancer and the cause of death for so many. The development of resistance to systemic therapies also remains an unsolved issue. And triple-negative breast cancer, the most aggressive tumour subtype, is still lacking targeted therapies.

“In my opinion, one of the essential areas of research that still needs to be addressed and deepened is the development of concrete, personalized and targeted therapies able to simultaneously tackle primary tumour cells and dormant cancer cells while teaching the immune cells of the microenvironment, how to attack the tumour”.

Dr Manuel Valiente, CNIO, Spain:

“Cancers are not solely depending on cancer cells proliferating, but also on the tumour microenvironment. The microenvironment is the normal organ that in principle is doing its normal function. But when the cancer is there, these normal functions are changed so that the microenvironment is no longer serving the person, but serving the cancer. I think this is going to open a new area for developing therapies.”

Another exciting area of cancer research is one we are working on, and that is personalized therapies for cancer applied to metastasis. If you have a metastasis in the bone, we know that there is a survival mechanism that cancer cells need to colonise the bone. And that may be different to how these cells colonise the brain. So in the future, we are going to start seeing therapies that are applied according to where the metastasis is located. The hope is that by developing these new therapies we will be better able to fight cancer.”