A marker for breast cancer
An international scientific collaborative led by the Harvard Stem Cell Institute’s Kornelia Polyak has discovered why women who give birth in their early 20s are less likely to develop breast cancer eventually than women who don’t, triggering a search for a way to confer this protective state on all women. The researchers are now testing p27, a mammary gland progenitor marker, on tissue samples collected from thousands of women over decades — women whose medical histories have been followed extremely closely — to see if it is an accurate breast cancer predictor in a large population. If the hypothesis is confirmed, which appears likely within a few months, Polyak says the commercial development of a clinical test for breast cancer risk would follow. In a paper just published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, the researchers describe how a full-term pregnancy when a woman is in her early 20s reduces the relative...