Preserving tissue in a unique gel solution outside the body is a potential breakthrough for breast cancer research.
Research reveals that preserved breast tissue retains its structure, cell types, and drug responsiveness, similar to normal breast tissue.
Lasting up to a week or more, doctors will be able to identify the most effective drug treatments.
A research team funded by the Prevent Breast Cancer charity discovered this approach, and their paper was published in the Journal of Mammary Gland Biology and Neoplasia.
The move has been hailed a ‘game-changer’.
Lester Barr, a consultant breast surgeon and founder of Prevent Breast Cancer, said: ‘Breast cancer mortality is decreasing in the UK thanks to improved screening and treatment options, but incidences continue to rise, and breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in the UK. It’s, therefore, really important that we develop new prevention and risk-reduction options for women, especially for those with a high risk due to their family history or genetics.
‘This breakthrough means that researchers can test new drugs in the lab with far greater accuracy, which should mean fewer drugs failing at clinical trials and better results for women affected by this terrible disease. It’s a hugely exciting development in animal-free research, which puts us in a really strong place to find new drugs to prevent breast cancer.’
It could bolster the development of new drugs to treat and prevent breast cancer without the need for testing on animals.
Dr Hannah Harrison, a research fellow at the University of Manchester, said the discovery would help scientists test the most appropriate drugs on living tissue to treat and prevent breast cancer.
She said: ‘There are various risk-reducing options for women at high risk of developing breast cancer – for example, those with a significant family history or who have mutations in the BRCA [breast cancer] genes. However, not all drugs work for all women. This new approach means that we can start to determine which drugs will work for women by measuring their impact on living tissue.
‘Ultimately, this means that women can take the most effective drug for their genetic makeup.’
Harrison and her team kept breast tissue viable outside the body for relatively long periods.
By testing different hydrogel formulas, they found a solution that preserves human breast tissue for at least a week or longer.
‘This is a real game-changer for breast cancer research in many ways. We can better test drugs for both the prevention and treatment of cancer and can examine how factors like breast density – which we know is a risk factor for breast cancer – react to particular hormones or chemicals to see if this has an impact on cancer development.’
Scientists used the gel solution VitroGel to preserve the tissue.
In their work, they said identifying new drugs had been ‘hampered by a lack of good pre-clinical models’.
They said what has been available until now cannot ‘fully recapitulate the complexities of the human tissue, lacking human extracellular matrix, stroma, and immune cells, all known to influence therapy response’.
According to the World Health Organisation, breast cancer is the second most common form of cancer around the world.
