Over the past few years, methods for diagnosing and treatment breast cancer have improved. However, overcoming resistance to chemotherapy treatments is still a great challenge yet to be solved. As such, researchers from UIC Barcelona have conducted a study that not only analyses the entry mechanisms of chemotherapy drugs into breast cancer cells, but also reviews the resistance processes related to these mechanisms.
The study, titled “
Drug uptake-based chemoresistance in breast cancer treatment”, has been published recently in the journal
Biochemical Pharmacology and is the result of a research project by lecturer and principal investigator, Helena Muley, alongside Dr Núria Casals, head of the NeuroLipid Group at UIC Barcelona, Dr Rosalía Rodríguez and Dr Rut Fadó.
“Most of the research has focused on overcoming this resistance and improving the entry of drugs using, for example, nanomedicine design”, explains Muley. “The drugs’ entry into the cancerous cell is essential for it to reach the place where it carries out its action. Increasing this entry means lower doses of chemotherapy that achieve the same or better efficiency levels and therefore, reduce the adverse effects caused by this kind of treatment”.
As demonstrated by the paper, thanks to nanomedicine, nanoparticles use chemical and physical processes in the human body to carry necessary drugs in disguise into cancerous cells, improving their efficiency and reducing any adverse effects. Improving these strategies to overcome chemoresistance would be a significant step forward in the fight against breast cancer.
