Breast cancer is diagnosed in almost 46000 women annually, of which almost 9000 have ‘triple negative breast cancer’. Survival rates of people having this particular type of cancer are quite bleak, the only standard treatment being surgery or chemotherapy.

The tumours of the ‘triple negative breast cancer’, in fact, do not respond to targeted medicinal drugs such as Tamoxifen or Herceptin. Scientists have, recently, discovered the source of the ‘triple negative breast cancer’ raising hopes that new drugs to tackle the disease could be produced.

Breast cancer has commonly been thought to originate from basal stem cells which are long-lived and can divide many times. Research, however, shows that it is the ‘intermediary’ cells or progenitors that cause more aggressive types of cancers, including the ‘triple negative breast cancer’.

This breakthrough discovery by leading researchers has been published in Cell Stem Cell a medical journal. Dr Matt Smalley from the Breakthrough Breast Cancer Research Centre at The Institute of Cancer Research is the head researcher involved in this leading discovery and he conducted clinical tests on mice to hit upon this major finding.

Breast cancer causing defective gene BRCA was administered by Dr Matt and his team to laboratory mice – with the stem cells of some mice being infected and the intermediary cells of others being injected. It was discovered that cancers that developed from each of these two types of cell were extremely different in nature.

The cancers that were caused by the intermediary cells were the more aggressive type, almost akin to ‘triple negative breast cancer’ and those forms that are hereditary and run in families. Scientists hence deduced that the two most aggressive forms of breast cancer, the triple negative breast cancer and the one caused by defective BRCA genes originated in intermediary cells.

Breast cancer treatments can be now found, considering that the origin of the cancerous cells and tumours has been discovered. The fact that the biology of the aggressive cancer has been finally unearthed, the day may not be far when a complete cure for the disease may be in sight.