Tamoxifen works by substituting for estrogen in breast tissue, hogging all the estrogen receptors on breast cancer cells.
But the results get more promising in the patients in whom at least 25% of breast cancer cells expressed GPNMB.
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Magnetic, nonradioactive nanoparticles (a tiny fraction of the thickness of a human hair and invisible to the human eye) are injected into the subject, where they bind only to known breast cancer cells within the body.
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Using tumor samples from wo-men with breast cancer, he used a gadget called a cell sorter to sift through dozens of different proteins on the surface of breast cancer cells, searching for patterns that might identify stem cells.
Given intravenously, Kadcyla courses through the body, looking for breast-cancer cells with a distinguishing feature: a high number of a particular protein, called HER2, on their surface.
Because the most common types of breast cancer depend on estrogen to grow, experts once feared that soy isoflavones could stimulate the estrogen receptors in breast-cancer cells, even though the estrogens in soy are much weaker than those produced by the body.
"The vast majority of women are capable of hearing this information and not freaking out, " says the Mayo Clinic's Dr. Rhodes, who is studying a new technology, Molecular Breast Imaging, that uses a tracer substance that makes cancer cells highly visible, and which she says shows promise in detecting cancers in dense breast tissue.
After years of work his team, in early 2003, unearthed a rare group of stem cells present in human breast cancer tissue.
These mutant stem cells already have been found in breast cancer, two types of leukemia and multiple myeloma.
The researchers, from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, found that when two proteins, called AIB1 and HER-2, are present in high levels in the cells of women who have had breast cancer, their tumours are resistant to the cancer-fighting effects of tamoxifen.
The antibody portion targets cancer cells that express the GPNMB protein, which has been shown to correlate with poorer outcomes in breast cancer patients.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a new drug for treating breast cancer that effectively targets tumors, thus minimizing damage to other cells in the body.
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Genentech has two potential follow-ups to its breast cancer drug Herceptin, one of which delivers tiny bits of poison to cancer cells.
Tamoxifen keeps cells from using estrogen, so it can keep most kinds of breast cancer from growing.
The new test would identify cells that over-expressed three genes Corixa discovered while trying to develop a breast cancer vaccine.
The drug, which hits a key growth-promoting molecule inside cells, called mTOR, is also showing surprising preliminary promise in treating advanced breast cancer patients.
The presence of these rare "circulating tumor cells" may indicate that a patient's cancer is metastasizing, spreading from the breast, say, to the lungs.
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