BREAST CANCER RESEARCH RIGHT NOW! 11: Gene That Says, “Breast Cancer Cells? INVADE THE BODY!” Discovered

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…

 

Every month, I’ll be highlighting breast cancer research that is going on RIGHT NOW! Harvested from different websites, journals and podcasts, I’ll translate them into understandable English and share them with you. Today: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130614081714.htm (Yeah, I know, this seems to be the site that highlights cutting edge breast cancer research – there’s SO much more there, you should put it on your Favorites Bar and check it often! If you don’t get something, I CAN translate (BS in biology, 33 years of experience teaching science of all sorts, to kids of all sorts…from astronomy to zoology. I CAN help!)

 

One of the most horrifying pronouncements breast cancer survivors can hear comes AFTER the initial diagnosis: “I’m sorry, the cancer has spread.”

 

“Why?”

 

“We don’t know for certain, we only know that there are indications that you might have…bone cancer…lung cancer…brain cancer…liver cancer…”

 

The post more people have gone to on this blog is the one on brain cancer (admittedly, the reason they go there is because more people GOOGLE “brain cancer” when they have a bout of extended, unusual headaches than just about any other normal, more average diagnosis – like dehydration…), and the 4-part series on metastatic breast cancer garnered 7% of ALL the hits on this site (with 116 posts). This is a big deal!

 

So what’s new?

 

ROR1, is what.

 

Identified by a team of researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center, ROR1 is a (thankfully shortened) acronym for “Receptor-tyrosine-kinase-like Orphan Receptor 1”.

 

And that is????

 

How to explain this…OK – a baby develops from conception. How do an egg cell and a sperm cell create heart, lung, and toe cells? The process of changing the sperm and egg cell into the rest of a person, is controlled by family of molecules in the growing baby called ROR1. I won’t get into the technical language regarding this protein except to say that they “live” on the surface of cells and they attract and hold lots and lots of growth controlling molecules, hormones and other molecules carrying chemical messages from other parts of the body.

 

ROR1 is also active at exactly two times in a human’s life: during the growth of the embryo and during cancer cell growth.

 

The team doing this research points out that the identification of ROR1 at these two times, “presents a singular, selective target for anti-cancer therapies that would leave normal cells unaffected.”

 

Normal cells unaffected! Can you imagine that? No more hair loss! No more muscle weakness! No more susceptibility to colds, flu, and every other disease known to humanity!

 

This is NOT a new therapy available today – but the research group suggests that “silencing expression of ROR1 reverses...and inhibits the metastatic spread of breast cancer cells in animal models. Moreover, the researchers found that treatment with a monoclonal antibody [a compound made by humans that is specifically targeted at a single, disease-causing organism. A cell poison for that organism could ride along with the compound] targeting ROR1 also could inhibit the growth and spread of highly metastatic tumors that express ROR1.”

 

In other words, they hope that women in the future diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer will have a powerful recourse that will be less invasive than any of the other.

 

Image: http://www.uscnk.com/img/Receptor-Tyrosine-Kinase-Like-Orphan-Receptor-1-(ROR1)-96522.jpg