Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers among women.

Thanks to years of basic research, it is also one of the most curable. The exception is a particularly aggressive variant known as triple negative breast cancer (TNBC). It accounts for 10 to 15 percent of all breast cancer cases. It disproportionately affects young women.

There are no effective treatments.

A new discovery by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory professor David Spector and graduate student Wenbo Xu, published in Molecular Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, may help identify the former. 

Spector's group has been studying the role of RNAs called long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) in cancer formation. Now they have found that a rarely studied lncRNA that has previously been linked to stomach cancer also plays a role in the development of TNBC. It is called LINC01235.

Spector's lab discovered LINC01235 while performing RNA sequencing of human breast tumor organoids, tiny three-dimensional models of cancer. Xu, who led the project, suspected a link between LINC01235 and TNBC when examining data from the Cancer Genome Atlas, a database of more than 11,000 cancer patients. The findings suggest that LINC01235 expression correlates with expression of the breast cancer gene NFIB, which is already linked to TNBC. However, “very little” was known about NFIB and almost nothing about LINC01235, Spector says.