Meagan Raeke for Penn Medicine News: “These mutations strongly predispose women to breast and ovarian cancers, and these cancers have a high risk of recurrence after initial treatment. In the new study, published this week in Nature Communications, the researchers compared a large set of tumors from patients with primary and recurrent BRCA1/2 mutation-associated breast and ovarian cancers, and found multiple features associated with recurrence, including features that would be expected to improve tumors’ ability to repair treatment-caused DNA damage.
“‘These results suggest key biological features of therapy-resistant recurrences, which point to new possibilities for treating BRCA1/2-mutation cancers,’ said the study’s senior author Katherine Nathanson, MD , the Pearl Basser Professor for BRCA-Related Research in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, Deputy Director of the Abramson Cancer Center, and Director of Genetics at the Basser Center for BRCA.”