(Press-News.org) DURHAM, N.C. – Estrogens are known to drive tumor growth in breast cancer cells that carry its receptors, but a new study by Duke Cancer Institute researchers unexpectedly finds that estrogens play a role in fueling the growth of breast cancers without the receptors, as well as numerous other cancers.
Appearing Sept. 27 in the journal Science Advances, the researchers describe how estrogens not only decrease the ability of the immune system to attack tumors, but also reduce the effectiveness of immunotherapies that are used to treat many cancers, notably triple-negative breast cancers. Triple-negative breast cancers are an aggressive form of disease that are negative for estrogen, progesterone, and the HER2 receptor proteins
Informed by retrospective analysis of patient data and experiments in mice, the researchers found that anti-estrogen drugs reversed the effects of estrogens, restoring potency to immunotherapies.
“The treatment for triple-negative breast cancer has been greatly improved with the advent of immunotherapy,” said senior author Donald McDonnell, Ph.D., professor in the departments of Medicine, Pharmacology and Cancer Biology, and Cell Biology at Duke University School of Medicine.
“Developing ways to increase the anti-cancer activity of immunotherapies is a primary goal of our research,” McDonnell said. “Here we have found a simple way bolster the effectiveness of immunotherapy for this type of breast cancer and the benefit was even seen in other cancers, including melanoma and colon cancers.”
McDonnell and colleagues, including lead author Sandeep Artham, a postdoctoral associate in the McDonnell lab, focused on a type of white blood cell called eosinophils, which are typically activated during allergic reactions and inflammatory diseases.
Eosinophils have recently been identified as important in tumors, and a phenomenon called tumor associated tissue eosinophilia, or TATE, is associated with better outcomes among patients with multiple types of cancer, including colon, esophageal, gastric, oral, melanoma and liver cancers.
In their studies, the Duke team described how estrogens decrease the number of eosinophils and TATE in mice. The hormone contributes to increased tumor growth in estrogen receptor-negative breast cancer tumors and in melanoma tumors, which do not rely on estrogen receptors for tumor growth.
Conversely, anti-estrogen therapies inhibited estrogen receptor signaling and enhanced the efficacy of immunotherapies, slowing tumor growth.
“These findings highlight the importance of estrogen-receptor signaling as a regulator of eosinophil biology and TATE and highlight the potential near-term clinical application of anti-estrogen drugs to increase the benefits of immunotherapies in multiple tumor types,” McDonnell said.
He said clinical trials are being planned using an investigational anti-estrogen drug called lasofoxifene among patients with triple-negative breast cancers.
In addition to McDonnell and Artham, study authors include Patrick K. Juras, Aditi Goyal, Prabuddha Chakraborty, Jovita Byemerwa, Siyao Liu, Suzanne E. Wardell, Binita Chakraborty, Daniel Crowder, Felicia Lim, Corinne H. Strawser, Madeline Newlin, Alessandro Racioppi, Susan Dent, Babak Mirminachi, Jatin Roper Charles M Perou, and Ching-Yi Chang.
The study received funding support from the Department of Defense Innovator grant (W81XWH-18-1-0064), the National Institutes of Health (R01CA276089, RO1-CA148761) and the National Cancer Institute Breast SPORE program (P50-CA058223).
###
END
In December 2020 the space probe Hayabusa 2 brought samples of asteroid Ryugu back to Earth. Since then, the few grams of material have been through quite a lot. After initial examinations in Japan, some of the tiny, jet-black grains traveled to research facilities around the world. There they were measured, weighed, chemically analyzed and exposed to infrared, X-ray and synchroton radiation, among other things. At the MPS, researchers examine the ratios of certain metal isotopes in the samples, as in the current study. Scientists refer to isotopes as variants of the same element that differ only in the number of neutrons in the nucleus. Investigations ...
A new study shows how individual brain cells in the hippocampus respond to pronouns. “This may help us unravel how we remember what we read.”
Read the following sentence: “Donald Trump and Kamala Harris walked into the bar, she sat down at a table.” We all immediately know that it was Kamala who sat at the table, not Donald. Pronouns like “she” help us to understand language, but pronouns can have multiple meanings. Depending on the context, we understand who the pronoun is referring to. But ...
Recently, a research group led by Prof. WANG Xianlong from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, successfully synthesized high-energy-density materials cubic gauche nitrogen (cg-N) at atmospheric pressure by treating potassium azide (KN3) using the plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition technique (PECVD).
The research results were published in Science Advances.
Cg-N is a pure nitrogen material consisting of nitrogen atoms bonded by N-N single bonds, resembling the structure of diamond. It has attracted attention because it has a high-energy-density and produces only nitrogen gas when it decomposes. ...
University of Maryland scientists uncovered evidence of an ancient seafloor that sank deep into Earth during the age of dinosaurs, challenging existing theories about Earth’s interior structure. Located in the East Pacific Rise (a tectonic plate boundary on the floor of the southeastern Pacific Ocean), this previously unstudied patch of seafloor sheds new light on the inner workings of our planet and how its surface has changed over millions of years. The team’s findings were published in the journal Science Advances on September 27, 2024.
Led by geology postdoctoral researcher Jingchuan Wang, the team used innovative seismic imaging techniques to ...
As Mark Hasegawa-Johnson combed through data from his latest project, he was pleasantly surprised to uncover a recipe for Eggs Florentine. Sifting through hundreds of hours of recorded speech will unearth a treasure or two, he said.
Hasegawa-Johnson leads the Speech Accessibility Project, an initiative at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to make voice recognition devices more useful for people with speech disabilities.
In the project’s first published study, researchers asked an automatic ...
NEW YORK, September 27, 2024 – Water scarcity, pollution, and the burden of waterborne diseases are urgent issues threatening global health and security. A recently published study in the journal Global Environmental Change highlights the pressing need for innovative economic strategies to bolster water security investments, focusing on the “enabling environment” that influences regional readiness for new business solutions.
Initiated and led by researchers at the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC), ...
The study, published in Lancet Neurology, detailed the “head-to-head” trial implemented by the researchers to test two drugs, mexiletine and lamotrigine, on people with the condition.
The trial, which was conducted at the UCL Queen Square Multidisciplinary Centre for Neuromuscular Diseases and the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, UCLH, involved 60 adults with confirmed non-dystrophic myotonia.
Patients were randomly assigned to receive either mexiletine for eight weeks followed by lamotrigine for eight weeks, or the reverse order, with a seven-day ...
HOUSTON ― The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center has posthumously awarded Michael Frumovitz, M.D., with the Julie and Ben Rogers Award for Excellence in Patient Care. The annual award recognizes employees who consistently demonstrate excellence in their work and dedication to MD Anderson’s mission to end cancer. The award’s focus rotates among the areas of patient care, research, education, prevention and administration, with this year’s award focusing on patient care.
Frumovitz dedicated more than 20 years of service to MD Anderson, most recently as chief patient experience officer and professor in Gynecologic ...
A University of Arizona College of Medicine – Phoenix researcher was recently awarded a $1.9 million National Institutes of Health grant to study the molecular mechanisms of how dilated cardiomyopathy progresses to heart failure, which could eventually lead to better preventive and treatment options for heart failure.
Heart failure is inextricably linked with dilated cardiomyopathy, or DCM, a disease characterized by the progressive enlargement of the heart and reduced contractility reflected by reduced ejection fraction. ...
Clinical cancer research in the U.S. is increasingly dominated by pharmaceutical industry sponsors, study finds
Study underscores need for increased investment in federally funded cancer clinical trials
SEATTLE – September 27, 2024 – Researchers at Fred Hutch Cancer Center identified a substantial increase over the past decade in the proportion of patients with cancer in the U.S. who participate in pharmaceutical industry sponsored clinical trials compared to those conducted with federal government support. Published in The Journal of Clinical Oncology and presented at the ASCO Quality Care Symposium, these findings reveal trends of underinvestment in federally ...
