Hormone receptor-positive breast cancer can spread throughout the body via the bloodstream as circulating tumor cells, or CTCs, which eventually reach distal (remote) body sites to form metastatic tumors. An increase in ribosomes, the protein-making machinery found in every living cell, increases their potential to form metastasis, report investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center (MGH) and Harvard Medical School (HMS).
Their observation shows that a subpopulation of CTCs enriched from the blood of breast cancer patients have higher levels of ribosomal proteins (RP) and that their presence is associated with increased disease aggressiveness and poor clinical outcomes.
Importantly, the discovery also suggests that a combination of targeted therapies that disrupt the ribosome function and inhibit cancer cell growth slows the spread of breast cancer in a mouse model.
Their work is described in a first release paper published online in Science.
