A gene linked to breast cancer can stimulate cancer growth of advanced prostate that kills some 44,000 American men each year. The finding, from a study of transplanted tumors in mice and reported this month in Nature Medicine , raises the prospect of one day prostate cancer treatment with a drug that reduces breast tumors in women.
caught early, prostate cancer can be treated chemically castrate the patient. At this stage, the tumors thirst androgens - male hormones such as testosterone - and will shrink if they are blocked by drugs. But eventually (usually after a few years) tumors are learning to live without hormones and start to grow and spread again. Once this happens, no treatment can control them. The cancer itself weans of androgens, oncologist Charles Sawyers and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, believe, developing the taste of the protein produced by the gene HER-2 / neu . The gene also allows some breast cancers grow without estrogen.
Sawyers and the company found that advanced tumor stage prostate grafted into mice contained numerous times more protein HER-2 / neu tumors to androgen-dependent stage earlier. They also found that androgen dependent tumors grow without hormones if they were infected with a genetically modified gene loaded with the virus. The researcher concluded that the protein / neu HER-2 stimulated androgen receptors in cells in late phase, triggering the continuous cell division without the need of androgens.
If HER-2 / neu fuels cancer growth in advanced human prostate, the disease might respond to Herceptin, a drug against breast cancer which binds the protein / HER-2 neu. But Tapio Visakorpi, an oncologist at the University of Tampere, Finland, whose commentary on the results also appear in Nature Medicine warns: "There is still a very, very long way to browse to say whether Herceptin be useful in the treatment of prostate cancer. "Visakorpi said that researchers should then determine whether HER-2 / neu is also prevalent in tumors of advanced prostate in men as it is in the transplanted cancers in mice. Sawyers, who intends to test Herceptin mice, agrees. "My hope," Sawyers said, "is that this document will force people to answer this question."
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