St Vincent's Institute

The first described cases of breast cancer hail from ancient Egypt. A papyrus written sometime between 3000 and 1500 BC documents eight cases of breast tumours. The document also acknowledged that there was no treatment for the disease and recommended cauterisation of the tumour as a palliative measure.

Things are considerably different in the modern age. New treatments mean that a woman’s risk of dying from breast cancer is ever decreasing: from 1 in 29 Australian women in 1982, to 1 in 37 in 2007. However, despite these advances, every year around 2,700 Australian women die from breast cancer.

SVI’s Professor Rik Thompson, Head of the Invasion and Metastasis Unit, has focussed on cancer since 1986, when he undertook postdoctoral training in the U.S. He returned to SVI in 1997 to head up the Invasion and Metastasis Unit.

Rik’s group works at trying to understand why cancer cells spread to other parts of the body in about 25% of breast cancer patients, forming a secondary tumour. The most common sites for these secondary tumours are the bones, liver and lungs.

Rik explains, “Spreading of cancer cells from the breast to other parts of the body can be likened to certain events during early development (before birth), where cells in the embryo move around to ultimately form new organs. To do so, these cells change their shape, behaviour and molecular make-up.”

Rik’s group has evidence that breast cancer cells use this developmental process to form a secondary tumour. The researchers are targeting this process, with the hope of being able to eradicate the cells that have migrated away from the primary tumour, and so prevent recurrence.

By being able to predict the likelihood of breast cancer recurrence and developing better therapies against it, this research has huge potential to save lives and to lighten the burden of uncertainty for breast cancer patients.