Biomarker could help guide cancer therapy, avoid drug resistance

Tuesday, November 22, 2016 - 00:21 in Health & Medicine

MIT biologists have identified a new biomarker that can reveal whether patients with a particularly aggressive type of breast cancer will be helped by paclitaxel (commercially known as Taxol), one of the drugs most commonly used to treat this cancer. The findings could offer doctors a new way to choose drugs for this type of breast cancer, known as triple-negative because it lacks the three most common breast cancer markers: estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor, and Her2 protein. The biomarker, a protein called Mena, has previously been shown to help cancer cells spread through the body. The researchers also showed that combining paclitaxel with another drug that interferes with Mena’s effects can kill the cells much more effectively than paclitaxel alone. “Drugs that target that pathway restore paclitaxel sensitivity to cells expressing Mena,” says Frank Gertler, an MIT professor of biology and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. “The study...

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