If drugs don't work, convert the cancer

摘要

You can't kill the beast, but perhaps soothing it will work. Rather than attacking hard-to-treat tumours directly, it might be possible to transform them. That is the possibility raised by the discovery of a genetic switch that may turn the fiercest breast cancer into a relative pussycat. To grow, about 85 per cent of breast cancer tumours need the hormones progesterone or oestrogen, or a protein called HER2. That usually makes treatment simple: block those chemicals and you halt the cancer. But the other 15 per cent are called triple negative breast cancers, because they don't need any of the three chemicals and thus resist such treatments. Up to half of people with triple negative cancer die within five years of diagnosis.