Breast cancer drugs may put some cells into 'sleeper mode'

Breast cancer drugs may force some cancer cells into 'sleeper mode', allowing them to potentially come back to life years after initial treatment.

The research could open avenues for finding ways of keeping the cancer cells dormant for longer, or even potentially finding a way of awakening the cells so they can then be killed by the treatment.

The team studied human breast cancer cells in the laboratory and examined the effects of a group of breast cancer drugs called hormone treatments.

"For a long time scientists have debated whether hormone therapies - which are a very effective treatment and save millions of lives - work by killing breast cancer cells or whether the drugs flip them into a dormant 'sleeper' state," said the lead author of the study.

"This is an important question as hormone treatments are used on the majority of breast cancers. Our findings suggest the drugs may actually kill some cells and switch others into this sleeper state," she added.

"If we can unlock the secrets of these dormant cells, we may be able to find a way of preventing cancer coming back, either by holding the cells in permanent sleep mode, or be waking them up and killing them," she said.

In the study, the team studied around 50,000 human breast cancer single cells in the lab, and found that treating them with hormone treatment exposed a small proportion of them as being in a dormant state.


The 'sleeper cells' may also provide clues as to why some breast cancer cells become resistant to treatment, causing a patient's drugs to stop working, and their cancer to return, the researchers said.

Hormone therapies are used to treat a type of breast cancer called estrogen-receptor positive. These make up over 70 per cent of all breast cancers, and are fuelled by the hormone estrogen.

These cancers are usually treated with surgery to remove the tumour, followed by a course of targeted hormone therapy - usually either aromatase inhibitors or tamoxifen, which target estrogen receptors.

However, around 30 per cent of breast cancer patients taking hormone therapies see their cancer eventually return - sometimes as long as 20 years after treatment.

This returning cancer is usually metastatic, meaning it has spread around the body, and the tumours are often now resistant to medication.

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Protein that affects breast cancer identified

Scientists claim to have made a major breakthrough in breast cancer research, by identifying a protein which plays a key role in influencing the severity of the growth of tumours.

A team, led by Clare Fedele of Monash University, has discovered the levels of the protein, inositol polyphosphate 4-phosphatase-II (INPP4B), in tumours determine the severity of breast cancer in women.

Fedele said: "We looked at a specific subtype of aggressive breast cancer and found that in about 90 per cent of these types of almost untreatable tumours, INPP4B was gone.

"This particular subtype of aggressive tumour doesn't usually respond to treatments such as Tamoxifin. But knowing the correlation between the amount of INPP4B protein and the cancer means we can at least consider treatment alternatives."

The scientists have also devised a new antibody which could identify the protein and measure its presence in breast cancer tissue. "We created an antibody to INPP4B, which works by specifically detecting the protein in biopsies from breast cancer patient samples," Fedele said.