One out of eight women is or will be diagnosed with breast cancer, according to the International Agency for Research in Cancer. This is the leading type of cancer in women, accounting for around 25% of all cases, and more than 420,000 new cases are diagnosed each year in Europe. Therefore, there is an urgent medical need to develop new therapies, which ensure effective treatment for the different breast cancer subtypes, particularly the triple-negative breast tumor subgroup.
p38Cure has used human patient derived xenografts as a preclinical model that recapitulates the complexity and heterogeneity of the human tumors and are very useful to develop and test new therapies.
Our experiments provide evidence that pharmacological inhibition of p38 MAPK potentiates the ability of chemotherapeutic drugs that are currently used for breast cancer therapy to reduce the size of tumors in patient-derived xenografts of triple-negative and luminal subtypes. These results are specially relevant in the triple-negative breast cancer subtype against which there is no targeted therapy.
Moreover, we have identified a group of patients who are likely to benefit from the new combination therapy. Taking together, the results obtained in p38Cure should help to predict the prognosis of treatments and select patients for new clinical assays.
