United States: Researchers have discovered that some healthy women have cells in their bodies that show signs of breast cancer, even though they aren’t sick. This new finding could make scientists rethink how we classify cancer and spot it in its earliest stages.
These cells are referred to as aneuploid, they have an erroneous chromosomal count; they have both too many and too few. Some do – it’s common in invasive breast cancer and researchers purport that the chromosome imbalance empowers cancer to spread and escape the body’s strength.
Now there appears that aneuploid cells can also exist when there is no malevolently transforming neoplasm anywhere in the body. The researchers from the University of Texas and the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas identified them in breast tissue samples of 49 women with no known disease.
As reported by the sciencealert.com, “From now on we always thought that normal cells have, in fact, 23 pairs of chromosomes and now it turns out that does not seem to be the case because every healthy woman that we looked at in this study had abnormalities that raised the rather profound question of when, in fact, cancer actually happens,” says biologist Nicholas Navin from the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas.
2)Now it appears aneuploid cells might also be present even when there's no cancer in sight.https://t.co/Hu2B8nfEcl
— Amicus Curiae (@AmicusCuri99068) December 23, 2024
“I estimate that a cancer researcher or oncologist recognizing these normal breast tissue cells would beyond the shadow of a doubt identify them as invasive breast cancer when viewing the genomic picture.”
With modern technologies such as single-cell sequencing, the team was able to find markers of aneuploidy – these were observed in about three percent of the total of breast epithelial cells investigated for each of the women. Epithelial cells cover the walls of internal organs and the outer surface of the skin, and are believed by many to be the source of cancer.
Many of the aneuploid cells displayed the feature of CoAM, which is characterized by copying number changes that involve the duplication or deletion of segments of DNA. These variations are thought to affect cancer progression due to these modifications.
The cellular changes occurred more commonly as the women got older. The most feasible changes – more 1q and less 10q, 16q, 22 – are also observed in breast cancer.
Another finding was that the aneuploid cells were mainly found in two breast cell lineages involved in secreting milk: This new classification is grouped into two subtypes; Luminal Hormone Receptor-Positive (LumHR) and Luminal Secretory (LumSec).