In addition to being excellent life companions, cats could help us better understand and perhaps even better treat some of our cancers, including breast cancer, a group of international researchers suggested Thursday.
In a study published in the journal Science, these experts in veterinary and human medicine were interested in possible similarities between humans and cats when it comes to cancers.
If such links between dogs and humans have been pointed out by previous research, practically nothing existed on the side of our feline friends, explains to AFP Louise van der Weyden, researcher in oncogenetics at the British Wellcome Sanger Institute and co-author of the study.
However, cats are, just like dogs, “excellent models for us” because they are exposed to the same environment, in particular to “pollution or passive smoking”, and develop “the same diseases as us”, such as cancers or even diabetes, she notes.
– Same gene –
Based on this principle, Ms. van der Weyden and her colleagues analyzed cancer tumor samples from nearly 500 domestic cats from five countries and covering 13 different types of cancer (brain, breast, lung, skin, etc.).
As cancers are caused by genetic mutations, the teams looked for changes in the DNA of these tumor cells similar to those already identified in human medicine.
Several similarities between the two species have thus appeared, particularly in terms of breast cancer. In more than 50% of the cat mammary tumors analyzed, a gene called FBXW7 that had already been identified in human medicine appeared mutated.
If this mutation is not very common in women with breast cancer, it causes “a particularly aggressive type” of cancer for those who have it, underlines the researcher, noting that these breast cancers are also very aggressive in cats.
– “Win-win” –
“For this small percentage of women who carry it”, this discovery is “tremendous” because it could open the way to new treatments, she adds.
While holding clinical trials in humans is complicated by the very low number of patients affected, the mutation is very common in cats and targeted treatments could therefore be tested more easily in veterinary clinics.
“I would personally be more inclined to take a drug that has been tested on cats than on mice,” smiles the scientist.
Encouraged by this parallel, Swiss researchers carried out additional experiments on these samples and discovered that two chemotherapy treatments seemed very effective against tumors carrying this mutation.
If they remain to be confirmed by other work, these results could quickly benefit women as well as cats, because these drugs are already authorized for humans and animals, points out the study.
These results could also improve the study of “cancer initiation processes”, analysis with AFP Harikrishna Nakshatri, professor at Indiana University and specialist in breast cancer.
For this expert who did not participate in the study, these “fascinating” results could “help us better understand the interaction between genes and the environment”, today considered the “main suspect” in the transformation of cells carrying these mutations into cancer cells.
However, the ambition is not only to help research in human cancerology, insists Louise van der Weyden, who pleads for these discoveries to also be used to better care for our four-legged companions by offering them, for example, targeted treatments already used in humans.
Such an approach would be “win-win for both animals and humans,” she maintains.
AFP
