Good news! Cancer is history (soon)!
"An enigmatic type of circulating tumor cell called a dual-positive (DP) cell is associated with shorter survival time in patients with advanced breast cancer, according to a study ...
The findings highlight the potential importance of these under-studied cells in breast cancer progression.
Circulating tumors cells are breakaway tumor cells that can seed secondary tumors (metastases) and are commonly detected in the blood of patients with cancer.
Dual-positive cells are circulating cells that bear both tumor-cell and immune-cell markers and are thought to be hybrid cells resulting from rare fusions of tumor cells with immune cells. Recent studies have linked DP cells’ presence in patients’ blood to worse outcomes in melanoma and pancreatic cancer. ...
researchers linked DP cells to shorter survival times in patients with advanced breast cancer, especially the aggressive “triple-negative” breast cancer subtype. The team also showed with animal models that DP cells can seed breast cancer metastases. ..."
From the editor's summary and abstract:
"Editor’s summary
Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are tumor cells that are present in the blood of patients with cancer that rarely express both epithelial and leukocyte markers, termed dual-positive cells (DPcells). Here, Reduzzi et al. evaluate the prognostic ability of these DPcells in patients with breast cancer (BC) to predict prognosis and create a preclinical mouse model of BC to understand their metastatic ability. They show association of DPcells with worse overall survival, and genomic alterations confer increased metastatic ability in mouse models. This suggests the potential of DPcells in guiding patient treatment that warrants further study. ...
Abstract
Metastasis is the leading cause of death in patients with breast cancer (BC), but the mechanisms underlying metastasis formation are still poorly understood. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are considered the main seed of metastasis with demonstrated prognostic impact in patients with BC. They are conventionally identified as cells positive for epithelial markers and lacking leukocyte markers. Nonetheless, circulating cells expressing both markers [dual-positive cells (DPcells)] have been reported but poorly investigated.
Here, we evaluated, in a cohort of 340 patients with advanced BC, the prognostic impact of DPcells, showing their association with worse survival, particularly in patients with less than five CTCs. Their prognostic value varied among BC subtypes, with greater relevance observed in triple-negative and HER2-positive BC. Moreover, by performing single-cell genomic profiling of DPcells isolated from patients, we detected genomic aberrations in 28 and 93% of analyzed DPcells and CTCs, respectively.
In vivo, DPcells were detected only in the blood of immunocompetent but not immunodeficient mice and no differences in the lung metastatic colonization ability of DPcells versus control cancer cells were observed. Our findings highlight the importance of studying this overlooked subpopulation of CTCs as a prognostic biomarker in BC, which might be particularly important in specific BC subtypes. Moreover, our results support the malignancy and metastasis-forming capability of DPcells and underline the need for future studies better defining the origin of these cells."
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