Angel Nebreda, a molecular biologist at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Barcelona, and his team have discovered a new treatment to tackle triple-negative breast cancer that relies on a combination of various drugs included in chemotherapy and protein inhibitors.
Thus, according to the study’s report which has been recently published in the journal Cancer Cell, this new breast cancer treatment method has been developed after the study of the effects of the administration of medications that blocked the protein P38 Alpha in the treatments of breast cancer, combined, as mentioned, with two drugs used in the cure of triple-negative cancer breast tumors.
The researchers tested the new treatment on 9 mice that were inoculated with breast cancer.
The research opened new roads to developing new a breast cancer treatment
Thus, the scientists point out, the combination of drugs decreased or suppressed cancers in seven of the nine lab animals. In this sense, Angel Nebreda added that in two mice, one of which had triple-negative cancer, the disease did not reproduce, and in all those who reacted positively to the therapy there was a considerable reduction in the cancer cells.
In addition, the two cases in which the treatment had no effect are one of the most promising points of this work, as the study of their tumors showed that their cells had fewer chromosome alterations.
This means that inhibition of the P38 Alpha protein had no effect, which may lead to future genetic research revealing specific affected patients who may find this treatment useful for administering it only under appropriate conditions.
However, as the scientists admitted themselves, the study is small and has been carried out only on lab mice, thus, further research will be needed to clearly prove whether the combination of P38 Alpha protein blockers with typical drugs against triple-negative tumors is an effective breast cancer treatment or not.
