Rutgers unlocks mysteries of Lobular Breast Cancer

"Prior to this study, there had been very little clarity about the genetic defects driving lobular cancer development," said Michael Gatza, one of the lead authors on the analysis of more than 200 such tumors. The findings appear in the current edition of the medical journal Cell.Now, courtesy of his efforts along with those of colleagues around the country, a whopping 8,173 genetic coding mutations in lobular tumors have been identified. That lead them to be able to come up with three broad categories of sub-types of lobular cancer.
There was no single mutation common enough to be on par with the BRCA1 and 2 mutations, for which women with a family history of breast cancer are now tested. However, some of the mutations show up in other types of cancer - prostate cancer, for example - which raises the intriguing prospect existing drugs might be repositioned to battle lobular cancer.
Before the work of Gatza and his colleagues, not much was known about the biologic underpinnings of this form of cancer. Even less was known about tumors that displayed a mix of both ductal and lobular traits.
"The question we wanted to ask was, 'Is this really a third kind of cancer?," Gatza said. The answer is that when researchers look at these mixed tumors on the molecular level, they find they split into two categories of mostly ductal or mostly lobular, a distinction that might become important in considering treatment.