breast cancer cells

(Vanderbilt University Medical Center) New research may explain why breast cancer tends to be more aggressive in women with denser breast tissue.Breast cancer cells grown in dense, rigid surroundings step up their invasive activities, Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center investigators report in the Sept. 9 issue of Current Biology.

(Georgetown University Medical Center) Researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center have discovered that vitamin A, when applied to breast cancer cells, turns on genes that can push stem cells embedded in a tumor to morph into endothelial cells.

These cells can then build blood vessels to link up to the body's blood supply, promoting further tumor growth.

(University of Missouri-Columbia) It takes more than one punch to fight tumors. Often, tumors have more than one way of surviving, and attacking the tumor alone is not enough.

Now, in a new study, University of Missouri researchers have developed a new non-toxic treatment that effectively reduces breast cancer cells, by combining a small molecular drug that targets tumor cells with an antibody that causes selective shutdown of tumor blood vessels.

(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Researchers have discovered a new family of agents that inhibit the growth of estrogen-dependent breast cancer cells.

The finding, described today at a meeting of the Endocrine Society, has opened an avenue of research into new drugs to combat estrogen-dependent breast cancers.

(The Endocrine Society) Researchers have found a new family of therapeutic agents that interferes with the ability of estrogen to stimulate the growth of breast cancer cells.

The results of the new study will be presented by Nicole Patterson at the Endocrine Society's 90th Annual Meeting in San Francisco.

(Emory University) A tiny modification called methylation on estrogen receptors prolongs the life of these growth-driving molecules in breast cancer cells.

Most breast cancers contain estrogen receptors, which enable them to grow in the presence of the hormone estrogen.

Their presence can determine whether tumors will respond to the estrogen-blocking drug tamoxifen. The finding will help researchers sort out how mutations change the estrogen receptor's function and allow some breast cancers to resist tamoxifen.

(McGill University Health Centre) New studies from a team of researchers from the Research Institute of the MUHC and McGill University show that the environment surrounding breast cancer cells plays a crucial role in determining whether tumor cells grow and migrate or whether they fade away.

Their study is the first to identify the genes behind this environmental control and correlate them with patient outcome.

Their findings are published in this week's issue of Nature Medicine.

Epigenetic regulation -- modifications to the structure of chromatin that influence which genes are expressed in a cell -- is a key player in embryonic development and cancer formation.

Researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg now gained new insight into one crucial epigenetic mechanism and reveal that it acts much faster than assumed.

In this week's issue of Nature they report that estrogen causes rapid epigenetic changes in breast cancer cells.