October Is Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Aside from some types of skin cancer, breast cancer is the most common cancer in women in the United States, regardless of race or ethnicity. Almost everyone has had a friend or family member diagnosed with breast cancer. That’s not surprising, seeing that in 2014, the United States saw 236,968 women and 2,141 men diagnosed with breast cancer. Of course, breast cancer is just as prevalent around the world, too.

Which is why it’s so important that we use October to raise awareness about breast cancer and raise money for new research and treatments.

Stem Cells and Breast Cancer

This October, we’d like to share with you some of the great research being done to help develop new therapies to treat breast cancer. Some of the most interesting and promising research is being performed on stem cells and their relationship with, and potential for treating, breast cancer.

Because stem cells have the ability to develop into multiple different types of cells, they have great potential when it comes to new clinical applications. Researchers are now able to bioengineer cells with unique qualities that can be delivered to patients in order to treat disease. In many cases, the patient’s own cells are taken, engineered, and given back to them to treat their disease. As you may have guessed, this has led to applications for new cancer treatments.

Treatments for Metastases

The Harvard Stem Cell Institute, working with mice, was able to show the potential of a stem cell therapy to treat breast cancer metastases in the brain without damaging nearby tissue. The researchers were able to engineer neural stem cells to express a powerful version of TRAIL, a gene that can activate receptors found only on cancer cells that induce cell death. The researchers were even able to engineer the therapeutic cells so that they could be successfully eliminated after they had treated the brain metastases.

Further Research

More research from the University of California San Francisco shows that metastasizing cancer cells actually show qualities similar to stem cells. They found that early stage metastatic colonies and cancer cells traveling through the bloodstream expressed genes that were more typically active in stem cells and were distinct from the primary tumor cells. Yet, more advanced metastatic colonies were much more similar to the primary tumor. These remarkable insights could potentially lead to better targeted therapies and treatments for metastases.

If that sounds incredible, it just goes to show how far we’ve come, and how much potential there is in stem cell research and regenerative medicine.

Stem cell therapy is so exciting to us at Lifecycle because through our Regenerative Medicine division, we work closely with companies and research labs who are involved in developing these types of therapies. We’re proud to support some of the great work being done by cancer researchers in labs all over the world and it’s an honor to contribute to the lifesaving work that goes on in those research labs.

Contact us today to learn more about how outsourcing can help your lab focus on the most important work you do every day.