Nerves can affect breast cancer
The doctoral work of Ole Vidhammer Bjørnstad, which includes three coming scientific papers, has shed light on the occurrence of neural precursor cells in breast cancer, and the interactions between neural precursor cells and breast cancer cells.
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Ole Vidhammer Bjørnstad defended May 31, 2024 his PhD work at the University of Bergen with the dissertation "Neural Interactions in the Breast Cancer Microenvironment".
Main supervisor has been PhD Heidrun Vethe, and co-supervisors have been PhD Manuel Carrasco, PhD Dimitrios Kleftogiannis and Professor Lars A. Akslen.
This doctoral work, which includes three coming scientific papers, has shed light on the occurrence of neural precursor cells in breast cancer, and the interactions between neural precursor cells and breast cancer cells.
As the cancer research field has moved its lens from primarily cancer cells to the tumor microenvironment and its components, nerves have historically been mostly overlooked. Although nerves innervate the entire body and most tumors, nerves have been seen as mainly passive participants in the tumor microenvironment. In more recent times, the field of cancer neuroscience has gained traction, as the neuron-cancer cell reciprocity is being investigated. The primary objective of this thesis was to investigate interactions between neural cells and breast cancer cells.
Bjørnstad and the group studied three different aspects of neural involvement in breast cancer for these three sub-projects and papers as outlined. The incidence of doublecortin-expressing neural progenitors in breast cancer tissues and correlations with clinico-pathological features, and direct interaction between neural progenitors and breast cancer cells. They generated a novel 3D co-culture model for the neural progenitor cell-breast cancer interaction, showing upregulated markers associated with cancer progression after co- cultures with neural progenitors. Further, they established a 3D breast cancer model to study effects of the neurotransmitter noradrenalin and its influence on both basal- and luminal-like cell lines, showing that noradrenalin stimulates aggressive tumor features in spheroids of breast cancer cells. Finally, they have investigated the ability of breast cancer stem cells to differentiate into multipotent neural cells, such as precursors of the central and peripheral nervous systems.
The studies reveal important neural influences on breast cancer, demonstrating that nerve components contribute to tumor aggressiveness and cancer traits, and highlight the potential of targeting neural interactions in therapy development.
See the press release (Norwegian).