Investigating mechanisms of breast cancer cell growth and spread

Cancer cells face tough conditions due to their fast growth and lack of proper blood supply, which means they don’t have many nutrients available to them. To survive, breast cancer cells must adapt, finding ways to get essential nutrients, such as glucose and amino acids, to continue their growth.

This adaptability is more common in invasive breast cancers, and researchers are looking at how we can use this weakness to develop new ways to treat breast cancers.

Dr Elena Rainero of the University of Sheffield and her colleagues previously found that breast cancer cells can use the supportive structures of cells, called the extracellular matrix, as energy. This allows the cancer to grow despite the lack of normal nutrients within tumours. Healthy cells don’t behave in this way, so it could reveal new ways to treat the disease.

Researchers have found that breast cancer cells need a protein called integrin a2b1 to do this. It helps to take this unusual energy source inside the cancer cell. Once cancer cells have taken it in, they transport it to specialised structures to break it down and release the nutrients.

Elena is investigating integrin a2b1 and whether it helps breast cancer cells grow and spread. Since it’s found on the surface of the cell, she first wants to better understand how it’s moved inside and gets broken down.

Then she wants to get into the lab to test how this process impacts a breast cancer cell’s ability to grow and spread. And lastly, Elena and her team will test their findings in mice. They’ll block integrin a2b1 with drugs and assess the impact of this on tumour growth and spread to other parts of the body, where the disease becomes incurable.

This project will give us a better understanding of exactly how breast cancer cells sustain themselves, despite a lack of normal nutrients. And it could lead to the discovery of cancer-specific processes which could potentially be targeted with drugs. A treatment like this could come with fewer side effects, as healthy cells won’t be affected.

Around 55,000 people are diagnosed with breast cancer per year in the UK. Overall, this project has the potential to help thousands of people with all types of breast cancer.