Researchers at the Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center have completed an extensive mapping of healthy breast cells.
These findings offer an important tool for researchers at IU and beyond to understand how breast cancer develops and the differences in breast tissue among genetic ancestries.
Published this month in Nature Medicine, researchers developed a comprehensive atlas of breast tissue cells – including details on how genome is organized in each cell type and the effects of this genome organization on how RNA is made in each cell type to drive their function in various parts of the breast – using healthy breast tissue from women of diverse ancestry.
“Breast cancer shows variability in the outcome based on your genetic ancestry,” said Harikrishna Nakshatri, PhD, senior author of the study. “While socioeconomics are certainly a contributing factor, we believe biology and ancestry also play a role. This study will help us to address that biological, ancestral aspect.”
Nakshatri’s lab sequenced 88,000 cell nuclei from 92 women who donated healthy breast tissue to the Komen Tissue Bank at the IU Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center. The donors included people of African, European, Indigenous American, Hispanic, East Asian, Southeast Asian and Ashkenazi-Jewish-European ancestry.
The cell mapping includes data not only on the genes expressed in various cell types, but also on how the genes are organized and what specific gene expressions are limited to each cell type. Researchers know breast cancer most often originates in specific cell types and where it originates leads to different cancer type and treatment responses. This study could improve understanding of breast cancer development and lead to identifying new treatment targets.
The cell atlas information from the study will be broadly available to breast cancer researchers through databases offered by the National Institutes of Health, Human Cell Atlas and Chan Zuckerberg CELL by GENE Discover.
