New Hope For People With Advanced Breast Cancer

A surprising discovery by Queen's University researchers that happened when their work took an unexpected turn may help women with advanced breast cancer respond better to conventional drug treatments. The Queen's team's findings, to be published on-line today in the international journal Cancer Research, show that a newly discovered "peptide" molecule (a chain of amino acids smaller than a protein) increases the effectiveness by 350 per cent of drugs used to kill breast cancer cells. Drs. Zongchao Jia and Vinay Singh, of the Queen's Department of Biochemistry, initially intended to study the structure of a protein called SNCG which is implicated in drug resistance in breast cancer. When unraveling the structure proved more difficult than expected, the research team looked to a similar protein associated with Alzheimer's Disease.

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