Scientists have figured out a key process by which breast cancer spreads to other organs, and they have successfully blocked it in mice.
But they and others cautioned that there is no guarantee that such an approach would work in humans.
"The literature is littered with cures for cancer that worked in animals but haven't translated to humans," said Jonathon Sedgwick, director of immunology at the DNAX Research Institute in Palo Alto, Calif. "But this has the potential to influence how we might think about treating cancer in the future."
The DNAX researchers found that proteins that normally help guide infection-fighting white blood cells to their targets also play a key role in breast cancer's devastating spread.
They found that the proteins, called chemokines, are released in large amounts by the lymph nodes, bone marrow, lungs and liver. The chemokines then attract breast cancer cells circulating in the body. Those cells take root in the organs and form new tumors.
That explains why some organs become riddled with tumors in breast cancer patients, while other organs have few if any tumors, the researchers said.
The team, led by Albert Zlotnik and Anja Muller in collaboration with researchers at the National Cancer Institute in Mexico City, studied human breast cancer cells and tissue from human lungs, lymph nodes, bone marrow and liver.
They then took what they learned and used an antibody to suppress the interaction between chemokines and breast cancer tumor cells injected into laboratory mice.
In mice treated with the antibody, the number of lung tumors was reduced 60 percent to 80 percent, with some mice developing no tumors at all. All of the mice in comparison groups that received an ineffective antibody developed lung tumors.
The study appears in today's issue of the journal Nature. The DNAX institute is a division of pharmaceutical maker Schering-Plough Corp.'s research arm.
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