Breast Cancer Metastasis: Prognosis and Monitoring of Metastatic Disease

Approximately, 110 women will develop breast cancer and of these, a large number will succumb to their disease. Although there are many reasons for treatment failure, it is partly due to the inability of current clinical methods to detect disease progression. Since the production of several enzymes including the type IV collagenases and heparanase partly contribute to breast cancer invasion and metastases, we hypothesized that their measurement may provide a means of detecting the early onset of disease progression. This would be useful in two settings. First, if metastatic lesions could be detected by measuring the levels of these enzymes prior to the onset of clinical manifestations which mark this phenomenon, it may be possible to aggressively treat these patients. Second, by measuring these enzymes we hope to detect the relapse of patients being treated with chemotherapeutic drugsanti-estrogens again prior to the onset of clinical manifestations. Such patients could be rapidly switched over to alternate therapeutic strategies with the objective of controlling disease progression. Accordingly, we undertook studies to develop assays to measure type IV collagenases and heparanase and used these assays to measure these enzymes in serial serum samples from breast cancer patients.