Overcoming breast cancer’s resistance to PARP inhibitor drugs
Research Area: Better treatments
Professor Kristijan Ramadan is investigating how triple negative breast cancer can become resistant to drugs called PARP inhibitors and what treatments we could use next.
In this section
What's the challenge?
Sometimes breast cancer can become resistant to treatments, even new ones. It means they can continue to grow and could spread around the body.
We know that breast cancer can become resistant to drugs called PARP inhibitors. And they haven’t been around for long. So finding out exactly how this happens is essential to develop new treatment strategies, so that more people diagnosed with breast cancer can live and live well.
What's the science behind the project?
Professor Kristijan Ramadan of the University of Oxford and colleagues have recently discovered a potential way to reverse breast cancer’s resistance to PARP inhibitors. They think it’s possible to do it by targeting the cell’s recycling process. That’s because breast cancer cells can find a way to remove and recycle the toxic product of PARP inhibitors to resist this treatment. Understanding exactly how breast cancer cells do this, will help to find new treatments to stop this from happening. These treatments could then be used together with PARP inhibitors.
Firstly, Kristijan is assessing proteins potentially responsible for the removal of toxic molecules in triple negative breast cancer cells. This will help the researchers to determine how this process is controlled, and how cancer cells use it to remove these molecules to resist treatment and continue growing.
The proteins they’re investigating are called p97 and TEX264. And experiments will show how these proteins interact and when they do it. It’ll help the researchers to understand how resistance to treatment occurs. This new understanding could help them to come up with new strategies that use other drugs to make breast cancer sensitise to PARP inhibitors again.
What difference will this project make?
This project may provide new treatment strategies for triple negative breast cancer patients. As they have limited treatment options and poorer outcomes. It could also lead to brand new drugs to stop breast cancer becoming resistant to PARP inhibitor drugs and potentially other treatments.
How many people could this project help?
Around 15% of breast cancers are triple negative. Over 8,000 women are diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer each year in the UK. They may not all be treated with PARP inhibitors and their cancers may not become resistant to this treatment, but this project has a potential to help thousands of people.