Advances in research on the origin and evolution of breast cancer cells

Schematic diagram of the cell origin and evolution of BRCA1 mutant breast cancer

Recently, "Cancer Research" magazine published an online paper on the results of Xie Yuntao's team from Peking University Cancer Hospital .

Previous studies have suggested that the cell of origin of BRCA1 mutant triple-negative breast cancer may be luminal progenitor cells through flow sorting and mouse models.

In order to explore these scientific questions, Xie Yuntao’s team performed single-cell transcriptome sequencing on tumor samples, para-cancerous normal samples, and contralateral preventive resection samples from multiple BRCA1 mutant breast cancer patients, and performed single-cell transcriptome sequencing on these tumor samples and normal para-cancerous samples.

Compared with non-carriers, BRCA1 mutation carriers have an increased proportion of luminal progenitor cells in normal breast tissue, and the luminal progenitor cells have undergone epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), which may promote the occurrence of triple-negative breast cancer.

The study applied single-cell sequencing technology and other technologies to discover the abnormalities of the origin cells of BRCA1 mutant breast cancer and the origin cells before tumorigenesis.

The research project was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

Related paper information: org/10.