Tumor Evolution

It turns out that tumors do evolve. And the result ofthe evolution is that sometimes the cancer treatment stops working." A new study by researchers at Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI) at the University of Utah observed how breast cancer tumors evolve over time and demonstrated how changes within tumors may contribute to the process by which cancers no longer respond to treatment. Further, the research identifies that some of these changes may be shared across certain treatment-resistant breast cancers. "The problem in examining tumors is getting samples because that is that can be invasive. You can ' t really say to a woman with breast cancer ' be sure to stop by for your yearly tumor biopsy ' . They really do not want to keep the tumor around if they don ' t have to. So they had to be unique, which also meant a very small study size:" For this study, Werner and her collaborators were able to trace the timeline of treatment of four breast cancer patients, over the course of between two to fifteen years for the patients analyzed. In a unique collaboration between several researchers and medical oncologists, samples of cancerous tissues were collected from breast cancer patients during their regular course of treatment. The tissue samples were then sequenced to study how the samples changed over time and how the tumors responded to each treatment. Using these data, the researchers were able to assess how changes in the tumor coincided with when the patient ' s cancer stopped re...
Source: Caroline's Breast Cancer Blog - Category: Cancer & Oncology Tags: breast cancer breast cancer treatment cancer research change tumor Source Type: blogs