in the face of so much grief

[Lani]

I was looking for something hopeful to add here--I attended a hopeful lecture at Stanford this morning and talked with a researcher (on a topic unrelated to the talk) who has an interesting idea which
I will post more on later as she fills in the details.

The lecture was about genotyping (identifying the genes which characterize) circulating tumor cells and what that can tell you about which breast cancers metastasize, how they do it, and how one can tell if a particular treatment is working in a particular patient and how to tailor treatments to prevent resistance.

They looked at circulating tumor cells in real patients (as well as in mice with human bc implants). Interestingly, and scarily, the CTCs in the patients with metastatic breast cancer were not all the same in any one patient at any one time ie, there was a mix of ctcs with different genetic identities. There were two patients whose primary tumors were her2+ who developed metastasis among whose ctcs some were her2+ and some were triple negative while still continuing on herceptin!
Dasatinib was said to be helpful in treating triple negative patients ( determined by primary tumor) with ctcs so they proposed that a trial of herceptin+ dasatinib might help prevent the emergence of triple negative ctcss

Again, this is all very new and not yet published. Estimated publication date is in June.
The machine for finding CTCs and the microfluidic chips for genotyping them have already been developed, so things are well underway.

The interesting idea involved a target on some breast cancer patients' tumor cells called Na/Iodine symporter. The researcher is interested in looking at the primary tumors of bc patients for the presence of this marker.

If present, she would like to do a nuclear scan to determine where the breast cancer has spread to and then in a clinical trial use radioactive iodine like they do to cure thyroid cancer to kill the breast cancer cells.

Since the technology is already present and approved for another use, this bit of research looked closer to fruition, if perhaps not as widely applicable (the tumor has to have this marker)

I remember several people here have posted on their thyroid cancer treatments, and thought they might be able to give some input on this idea.

In the meantime, let's try to emerge from our grief ever more determined to make progress against this disease--and soon!