• Question: Has stem cell research been carried out on breast cancer and if yes are there any clinical trials available?

    Asked by kaye to Emma, James, Jayne, Kara, Sharon on 21 Mar 2011 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Sharon Sneddon

      Sharon Sneddon answered on 21 Mar 2011:

      Hi Kaye,
      Most of the work involving breast cancer and stem cells is to look at new ways of treating the disease. At the moment, I am using stemcells to look at why breast tumours spread around the body. When this happens, it can be hard to treat. We have identified a family of genes called caveolins and we think that having these genes in your cells makes the cancer cells spread. Now we know this, we are trying to work out ways of switching this gene off. The other thing we are trying to understand is why radiotherapy is not effective in some people and we think it’s because of the stem cells. Stem cells are really resistant to radiation so if a tumour has lots of stemcells, it’s going to be harder to kill off using radiation.
      This work is all very new so it will be a while before we can do a clinical trial on these things.
      There are however lots of clinical trials ongoing, a good place to get information on them is the cancerhelp.org.uk website!
      hope that helps

    • Photo: Emma King

      Emma King answered on 21 Mar 2011:

      Hi kaye, no there are no clinical trials for this that I know of. Generally stem cells are not much use in fighting cancer – because they are really good at growing new tissue whereas what we want to do with cancer treatment is stop tissue growing. Stem cells themselves may cause cancer if the treatments are not tested properly.
      Stem cells can allow us to grow banks of tissue to test drugs on though, so they may help in breast cancer in the long term by allowing us to develop better conventional therapies.

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