An Early Warning System For Dangerous Breast Cancer?

A test to detect the protein is still more than a year away from clinical trials. But promising early results show that RhoC can serve as a marker for breast tumors that are most likely to spread, or metastasize — even identifying them when they’re less than a centimeter in diameter.

Physicians from the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center developed the test based on their prior research on the RhoC gene, and proved its effectiveness in 182 tissue samples from the U-M’s breast cancer library. Results will be presented April 9 at the meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.

The test detected invasive cancer that had the potential to metastasize with 88 percent specificity, and had 92 percent specificity for tiny tumors that had already metastasized. Samples of normal breast, benign breast cysts, or non-invasive breast cancer had little RhoC.

“This is a very promising marker for small but invasive breast cancers that may metastasize, which right now are hard to identify,” says lead author Celina Kleer, M.D., an assistant professor of pathology at the U-M Medical School who specializes in breast cancer. “While more research is needed before clinical testing can begin, we hope it will help identify early-stage cancer that could be vulnerable to aggressive treatment, perhaps with drugs that target Rho protein.”

Kleer and her colleagues, including experienced RhoC researchers Sofia Merajver, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of internal medicine, and Kenneth van Golen, Ph.D., assistant professor, embarked on the study to find out how much RhoC was produced in different kinds of breast cancer cells, compared with normal breast cells.

Previously, they had shown that the RhoC gene was overexpressed in inflammatory breast cancer, a particularly deadly variety that grows and metastasizes quickly. Overexpression of the gene, they believed, might also occur in other kinds of aggressive breast cancer – leading to larger quantities of the RhoC protein in cells of those cancers.

RhoC, whose full name is RhoC-GTPase, is an enzyme involved in changing the internal skeleton of a cell — changes that allow a cell to polarize or move. That ability is important in muscle cells, which produce a lot of RhoC. But in cancerous non-muscle cells, RhoC is key to the structural changes that give a cell the ability to break off from a tumor, float through the body in the bloodstream, and take hold in a satellite location – in other words, to metastasize.

In finding the inflammatory breast cancer correlation, the U-M team was the first to show that RhoC, already implicated in liver, pancreas and skin cancer, was also involved in breast cancer. U-M researchers, led by Merajver, then showed that transplanting the RhoC gene into normal breast cells in mice transforms those cells into cancerous ones with metastatic potential.

The new research started with the development of a RhoC test. With help from the U-M Protein Structure Facility, and their knowledge of the RhoC gene, the team created an antibody that would latch on to RhoC protein anywhere in a tissue sample. A stain specific to the antibody then allowed the U-M researchers to see how concentrated the protein