How research key to helping treat patients

TRIPLE negative breast cancer is one of the most aggressive and difficult-totreat forms of breast cancer. A major issue with triple negative breast cancer is there is no selective therapy for it at the moment. For example, if somebody has oestrogen receptor positive breast cancer, they can be treated with tamoxifen, and herceptin is used in the treatment of HER 2 positive cancer.

However, triple negative breast cancer, as the name suggests, doesn’t have any receptors that we can target on its cell surface, so really there has been a complete lack of therapies for this type of cancer. Chemotherapy is currently the only treatment, and while it can be initially very successful, a large number of patients will relapse within three years.

The tumour that occurs after relapse tends to be much more aggressive and difficult to treat.

So any way that we can improve the efficiency of chemotherapy and reduce the likelihood of tumour relapse occurring would be of considerable benefit to triple negative breast cancer patients.

Until now, the exact mechanism of tumour relapse post-chemotherapy has been unknown.

But we have found one way in which this can happen.

We discovered that a stress response sensor called IRE1 can be turned on in cancer cells, leading to cancer cell survival and relapse.

We also found that targeting this IRE1 sensor with a new drug may improve the response to chemotherapy and reduce relapse rates for triple negative breast cancer.

Our newly published research in the ‘Nature Communications’ journal, which was carried out at the Apoptosis Research Centre at NUI Galway, under director professor Afshin Samali, could ultimately lead to a more targeted treatment for this aggressive cancer, which it is hoped would also reduce the rate of relapse.

Further research is needed, but this work is a great example of how curiosity-driven basic research can lead to discoveries with real potential to have an impact on patient treatment.