Breast cancer drug hope from leukaemia research

Leukaemia research may lead to new drugs for difficult-to-treat breast cancers, scientists have found.

These types of tumours cannot be treated with the targeted drugs which have hugely improved survival.

A team in Glasgow says a faulty piece of DNA which causes leukaemia also has a role in some tumours and could help in research for new drugs, reports BBC News.

Meanwhile, other researchers say they have taken tentative steps towards a blood test for breast cancer.

Oestrogen or progesterone positive breast cancers can be treated with hormone therapies such as Tamoxifen.

Another drug, Herceptin, works only on those tumours which are HER2-positive.

But around one in five breast cancers is "triple negative" meaning chemotherapy, radiotherapy or surgery are the only options.

A team at the University of Glasgow investigated the role of the RUNX1 gene, which is one of the most commonly altered genes in leukaemia.

However, they have now shown it is also active in the most deadly of triple negative breast cancers.

Tests on 483 triple negative breast cancers showed patients testing positive for RUNX1 were four times more likely to die as a result of the cancer than those without it.

The results were published in the journal PLoS One.