Page 26 - The Hormel Institute 2024 Annual Report

26 | THE HORMEL INSTITUTE
// UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
While significant advances in recent years have pushed the 5-year relative survival rate to greater than 90%,
the prognosis is much worse for the subset of patients with metastatic disease. The 5-year survival rate falls to approximately 30% when cancer has spread beyond the breast.
The most common cause of death in breast can- cer patients is from metastatic disease to various organs, and that is also resistant to all known ther- apies. This year, our research continued into how to prevent breast cancer from spreading to other organs and becoming resistant to treatment.
Cancer patients often develop iron deficiency anemia, for which they generally receive iron oxide nanoparticle infusions. Working with colleagues at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center (Baltimore, Maryland), we published a study that showed how iron oxide nanoparticles can inhibit metastasis in mice models of mam- mary cancer and let the mice live much longer (“Iron oxide nanoparticles inhibit tumor progres- sion and suppress lung metastases in mouse models of breast cancer.” ACS Nano, 2024).
We found that immune cells that routinely remove nanoparticles from the body may exhibit an “infection-like” response, triggered by some iron oxide nanoparticles, which also works to inhibit tumor growth and metastasis.
We also found that this effect of the nanoparti- cles involved inducing changes in immune-re- lated signaling that included a protein called interferon-regulatory factor-3.
Igor Entin, Anil Yadav, SURE intern Joseph Garry, Robert Clarke, and Anmol Banerjee.
These data support a compelling rationale to re-examine iron oxide nanoparticle formulations as part of combination chemotherapies to treat breast cancer patients. If these formulations could serve as immune adjuvants to boost patients’ immune responses without requiring uptake by cancer cells, it is possible they could be an answer for what is currently a lingering challenge in cancer treatment. Further studies are being planned as we continue forward.
“One in eight women living in the U.S. will develop breast cancer during her lifetime. On average, one American woman
dies of breast cancer every 13 minutes.”