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MicroRNAs - new research!!

chainsawz
0 Recommendations

Anyone read this article? Interesting indeed!!!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/6085695/Scientists-two-years-f rom-developing-potential-cure-for-breast-cancer.html

Here's the text of the article from the UK:

Researchers have found that the cancer manipulates molecules, called microRNAs, to allow malignant cells to spread throughout the rest of the body.

The discovery means they can now work on developing a drug to stop this process.

Dr Justin Stebbing, senior lecturer and consultant medical oncologist at London’s Imperial College, is one of the experts behind the breakthrough.

"There are no available drugs as yet but they should be available within a couple of years. This is a potential cure for breast cancer," he told the Daily Express.

"This is a step on the way to it and it helps us understand the way breast cancer cells grow and divide and if we understand this then we understand how it stop it.”

In healthy cells microRNAs stop them from growing and dividing but in breast cancer cells the microRNAs are turned off.

The experts, whose research is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, hope to develop a drug to prevent this.

Dr Stebbing said: “The way to cure breast cancer or any cancer is by fundamental biological understanding of what turns cells on and off, stopping the way tumours grow. We can use these microRNAs as a new treatment and make them do what current drugs don’t do.”

More than 45,500 women are diagnosed with breast cancer in the UK each year.

Explore topics in this discussion:

Cancer Prostate cancer Breast cancer

9 replies

Groovygirlcool

Every day in every way 'they' are getting "cleverer" and "cleverer".......gettting closer by the day - to the treatments that will keep us kickin' along- just you hang in there Miss Lisa - we'll do one almightly happy dance together at our Hot Cancer-Free Babe Retreat (Hawaii, perhaps?)!!!

The future's so bright....keep those shades handy!!

xxxGGC

gpawelski

Genes make proteins, the molecules that comprise and maintain all the body's tissues. Genes produce their effect by sending molecules called messenger RNA to the protein-making machinery of a cell. They set the protein-making machinery in motion through a "gofer" messenger called RNA (or mRNA).

The technique called RNA interference (RNA-i) allows scientists to "silence" certain genes. In RNA interference, certain molecules trigger the destruction of RNA from a particular gene, so that no protein is produced. Thus, the gene is effectively silenced. RNA interference is being widely used in basic science as a method to study the function of genes and it is being studied as a treatment for infections such as cancer.

RNA interference occurs naturally in plants, animals, and humans. RNA interference is important for regulating the activity of genes (a fundamental mechanism for controlling the flow of genetic information). RNA interference (RNAi) interferes with mRNA, a natural molecular switch, regulating gene expression in plants, animals and humans, by "silencing" over-active or malfunctioning genes.

The ability to transfect (introducing foreign DNA into a cell) cultured cells with DNA gene sequences has allowed us to assign functions to different genes and understand the mechanisms that activate or redress their function. It has made gene therapy and stem cell research possible.

Cell culture technology has revived many previously unattainable ambitions in medical science, including the Nobel prize winning discovery of RNA interference. Tissue culture methods have played a major part in the work of more than a third of the winners of the Nobel prize for medicine since 1953.

GirliebikerTPBC

Thanks gpawelski for always giving us detailed information about molecular biology and how it affects us and MBC. I've always been one to want to know more (my husband thinks I want to know too much) but I find solace in information and do not let it scare me.

Thanks again,
Joy

sr2603

Chainsaw - thanks for this info. It makes me so happy to read these articles when they come out. So I just hope my oncologist can keep me kicking around until new drugs come out. In the meantime I am trying to get someone who is doing the PART studes for triple negative patients.

I am amazed at how all you wonderful metavivors get this info! Good work

gpawelski

Joy

I never want to under-estimate the intelligence of board readers. You'd be surprise at what they know and can learn.

lusianagal

well lets hope the dr can keep me kicking for 2 more years then :)

Stella254

Thank you for the awesome article. I was also told by one of my nurses that she believed microRNAs were the answer. I will try to attach another article that talks about being careful about optimism, stressing that one pancreatic drug has not come to market and was developed in 1995. I understand not to rush to treatments that may harm us in the long run, but we can not sit and wait 14 years for a possibly curative treatment.
“Two years from breast cancer cure” – what’s the real story?

Claims of a "breast cancer cure in 2 years" are misleading
There were dramatic headlines in the papers this week claiming a “Breast cancer breakthrough”, with “Scientists ‘close to breast cancer cure’” or even “Two years from developing ‘potential cure’ for breast cancer”.

It almost seems too good to be true – and it is. The headlines have come from a paper describing laboratory-based research that is still a long way from the clinic, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

There’s no doubt that the findings in the paper are interesting and potentially important, but we feel that headlines touting that “millions of lives could be saved” by an imminent “cure for breast cancer” are excessive and give false hope to patients and their families.

This research isn’t about clinical trials of new drugs, or even about the development and testing of a new drug – it looks at fundamental cancer biology – the sort of foundations that such future developments are eventually built on.

In their paper, the researchers studied tiny molecules called microRNAs (miRNAs – for more background see this previous post), which help to control the activity levels of genes within cells. They discovered that particular miRNAs can, under certain conditions, switch off the oestrogen receptor, a key player in the development of breast cancer. And, in turn, shutting down the oestrogen receptor also shuts down production of the miRNAs themselves – the sort of feedback loop that’s quite common in biological systems.

This research helps us to understand more about the complex molecular circuitry inside our cells, and about some of the molecules we could try to target in order to develop new treatments.

But it’s a very long way from being a treatment for breast cancer – as we’ll see.

MicroRNAs – small but powerful
We’ve blogged before about one of cancer research’s hottest topics, miRNAs – tiny molecules that help to ‘fine tune’ gene activity.

In recent years, scientists have begun to understand that miRNAs are made from much smaller fragments of longer RNA ‘precursor’molecules. Dr Justin Stebbing at Imperial College, London, has been studying how miRNAs are made from these precursors, and how this process is affected in cancer.

The oestrogen receptor and breast cancer
In some women, the female sex hormone oestrogen fuels the growth of their breast cancer – explaining why hormone-blocking drugs like tamoxifen and anastrozole are often effective at treating the disease. Oestrogen works by attaching to a molecule within cells called the oestrogen receptor. Together, the hormone and its receptor travel into the cell’s nucleus switching on various genes, telling cells to multiply.

The researchers discovered that the oestrogen receptor switches on the production of certain miRNAs – tiny stretches of a molecule called RNA (see our previous post for more info). In turn, these miRNAs can switch off production of the oestrogen receptor.

In healthy cells, this helps to ensure that cells don’t over-respond to oestrogen – once the message has got through, the receptor is switched off – a bit like hanging up the phone at the end of a phone call. But in cancer cells, the receiver doesn’t get hung up, the message keeps getting repeated, and the cells multiply out of control in response to the hormone.

The scientists investigated this in more detail, and found that although the oestrogen receptor was switching on production of precursor miRNAs in breast cancer cells, for some reason, they weren’t being properly processed into functional miRNAs – so they couldn’t ’hang up the receiver’ and stop the cells from dividing. A very interesting finding, but a long way from anything resembling a ‘cure’.

What does it mean?
Dr Stebbing’s results help to unravel the complex communications circuits within cells that controls the activity of our genes, and helps to explain how this goes wrong in cancer. Now we know more about this, we can start to look for potential treatments.

One speculative idea might be to add extra processed miRNAs to breast cancer cells, to switch off the oestrogen receptor so the cells stop growing – but this needs to be explored in further experiments.

Will it lead to a “cure for cancer”?
These results come from experiments on cells grown in the lab, and on samples from breast tumours. Although there are a few miRNA-based treatments in early clinical trials, this research is nowhere near being a widely-available treatment, and to suggest otherwise is to raise false hopes.

Dr Stebbing says in some of the news reports “There are no available drugs as yet but they should be available within a couple of years.” Given the pace of scientific research, this is perhaps a little over-optimistic. And predicting when discoveries will be made – and when treatments will become generally available - is like trying to guess the length of a ball of very tangled string.

If all goes well, there could perhaps be an experimental treatment based on this research in pre-clinical development within a few years, before going into early-stage, small-scale clinical trials. Further large-scale trials would take even longer.

As an example, the discovery of the prostate cancer drug abiraterone was first made in 1995, yet despite the success of smaller studies we are still waiting for the results of large-scale trials. Ensuring that cancer treatments are safe and effective is not something that can be rushed, because the stakes are too high. And the results of early, exploratory laboratory research should be communicated with care and context, lest we raise expectations too far.

Kat

The NHS Choices blog has covered the science behind this story in more detail.

References:
Castellano, L. et al (2009). The estrogen receptor- -induced microRNA signature regulates itself and its transcriptional response Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0906947106

Thank you all. We will plug on till there is a cure. I am very hopeful for the 2 years. Stella

gpawelski

Epigenetics is a whole new science with important implications for the treatment of disease, most notably cancer. Epigenetics is the study of molecular modifications which sit on top of the DNA in our cells, in effect switching our genes on and off, telling our cells how they should behave.

Scientists are realizing that if those epigenetic markings are disrupted, causing a gene to become incorrectly active or silent, a healthy cell could become diseased. Research is beginning to uncover the mechanisms behind these switches and the circumstances under which changes occur.

We have hundreds of genes which, when working properly, keep healthy cells in check. These can be disrupted by damage directly to their DNA, but it's now been realized that epigenetic changes could also be responsible. A common epigenetic change in cancers is DNA methylation, which silences genes.

Almost every cancer cell has problems with the epigenetic programming, so an increasing focus of research has been to find drugs which can remove these chemical changes. At the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, Dr Jean Pierre Issa has been pioneering the use of two epigenetic drug therapies - decitabine and azacitidine.

Rather than killing cancer cells, these drugs remove the aberrant methylation, reactivating genes which had been silenced. In MDS, a bone marrow disorder which disrupts the formation of blood cells, it is predominantly caused by the methylation of one particular gene, so it has become an ideal candidate disease for epigenetic therapy.

Sources:
Edinburgh University
McGill University
MD Anderson
Johns Hopkins

beebie

Thank you for the excellent explanation of these biological processes underpinning the cancer disease process. It is difficult to find research data that provides sophisticated information in laymen's terms. Either info comes from a news paper or magazine article or a professional paper meant for doctors and ph.d's. nice to be able to read about the real science behind the headlines in thorough yet comprehendable language.

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