Brain Metastases Pathway Could Lead The Way For Its Cure

Around 200,000 patients with cancer are diagnosed with brain metastases every year. Still, the treatment options are minimum because the exact mechanisms involved in the spread of cancer to the brain remain unclear.

‘A poorly understood gene � YTHDF3 is found to facilitate key processes for brain cancer metastasis. This evidence could provide a biomarker for brain metastases and facilitate its early diagnosis and therapeutics.’

Brain metastases and its mechanism:
The study shows that raised YTHDF3 expression correlated with brain cancer metastases and poor survival outcomes in breast cancer patients. Further exploration of the mechanism revealed that YTHDF3 contributes to the expression of several genes known to drive cancer development, such as ST6GALNAC5, GJA1, EGFR, and VEGFA.

Experiments on Mouse models proved that in the absence of the YTHDF3 gene, prolonged survival and resistance to brain metastasis were developed. Thus the evidence could provide a biomarker for brain metastases and facilitate its early diagnosis and therapeutics.

The results also demonstrated increased YTHDF3 gene copy numbers in breast cancer brain metastases as compared to primary breast tumors. Additional copies of YTHDF3 in metastatic tumor DNA show that mutations have occurred as the cancer cells replicated and spread.

A gene's copy number is the number of times the particular gene appears in the genome.

"Now that we've shown how critical this gene is to the development of brain metastases, we plan to work on synthesizing drugs that can inhibit its function. This is an urgent need, and we're hopeful this research will eventually help save lives", says Huang, a member of the Cancer Biology research program at Massey and professor in the Department of Human and Molecular Genetics at VCU School of Medicine.

Source: Medindia