Brest cancer is the most common cancer in women. Among breast tumors that spread to other organs (develop metastasis), 70% belong to a variant, called luminal, whose cells are sensitive to the female sex hormones estrogen and progesterone. In fact, the tumor forms when these hormones order the cells to divide.
Healthy cells can only divide a limited number of times during an organism's lifetime. In contrast, tumor cells are immortal: they proliferate indefinitely and uncontrollably, and this is the defining characteristic of cancer.
• Telomeres are the structures that protect the ends of chromosomes. The ability of tumor cells to continue dividing indefinitely, as if they were immortal, depends on telomeres
• When telomeres are damaged, lung cancer cells lose the ability to divide and the tumor shrinks, new results show
• Targeting telomeres aims at "taking immortality away from cancer cells," says Maria Blasco, senior author of the paper