Scientists discover how fat tissue drives the spread of triple-negative breast cancer
· News-MedicalTriple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is aggressive and hard to treat. But the role of fat tissue in how the cancer spreads may help point toward new understanding and treatments, according to a new paper from scientists at the Hackensack Meridian Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI) and colleagues at Georgetown University's Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center.
What has previously been known is that the "metastatic cascade" begins with cancer cells invading the stroma which is the supportive tissue and blood vessels in the breast, enabled by invadopodia, which are kind of like tentacles of proteins protruding from the plasma membrane which degrade the body's defense and pave the way for cancer's spread. That process has been well observed by scientists.
Nagajyothi's team has now probed into the earlier phases getting to that process, focusing especially on those adipomes, which are kind of like cellular messengers which kick off the cancer growth cycle. Using human clinical samples acquired from the Hackensack Meridian Health (HMH) Network Biorepository and preclinical models, they scrutinized each step of the process. To do this, the team pioneered a first-of-its kind purification technique capable of isolating pure adipomes from intact tissues, blood, and other bodily fluids - a major technical hurdle that had previously blocked progress in the field. This unique method is so distinct that it is currently the subject of a pending U.S. patent application (US Patent App. 19/233,485) filed by Hackensack Meridian Health. Both Nagajyothi and Thangavel are named as inventors.
"Together, these findings establish adipocyte-derived adipomes as potent regulators of TNBC investigation and metastasis and reveal a previously unrecognized tumor-adipocyte signaling axis that may present new opportunities for therapeutic targeting," they conclude.
Nagajyothi and her laboratory have long focused on adipose (fat) tissues and their role in diseases such as Chagas cardiomyopathy, pulmonary tuberculosis, COVID and post-COVID cardiomyopathy, as well as non-infectious diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, lean diabetes, in addition to cancers (breast cancer and metastasis and multiple myeloma).
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