DOI:10.1016/j.ccell.2017.07.005

Breast cancer cells that spread to other parts of the body break off and leave the primary tumor at late stage of disease development, which was found by the scientists from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and their collaborators. The results, which published on Cancer Cell at August 14th this year, were shown that the realistic goal was catching and treating breast cancer before it spreads. It also opened the door for the assumption that drugs would work against breast cancer，even its spread.

It was estimated that 35,000 people in the UK suffered from metastatic breast cancer. The survival rate is poor. Only 15 % of women with breast cancer could survive for five years or more after being diagnosed. The prognosis has not improved in the past 20-30 years.

In this study, scientists investigated that how breast cancer was evolved from the originally to the spreading tumors, or metastasized. It was controversial that whether the breast cancer cells that spread to other parts of the body break off and leave the primary tumor in the breast at early or at late stages of cancer development. The researching team found that most of the genetic changes in the original cells of breast tumor were also present in the metastatic tumors, which revealed that the cancer cells spread in late period of the disease development.

This study was provided a greater chance for patients with breast cancer that the breast cancer at early stage could be cured to get rid of cancer cells spreading to other tissues, such as the lungs, brain and bone.

The whole genome sequencing provides the researchers accurate treatment strategies for different tumor types. For example, a patient with primary breast cancer was relapsed in the breast. Through sequencing, the team found that the assumed relapse was actually a second primary breast cancer. Genomic data enabled the scientists to tell these two scenarios apart, and then to change the treatment– it was difficult to distinguish by standard diagnostic methods.

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Reference

L.R. Yates, S. Knappskog, D. Wedge, et al. Genomic evolution of breast cancer metastasis and relapse. Cancer Cell, 2017, 32(2): 169-184. e7.