While antioxidants generally promote health, researchers have learned that under certain conditions some antioxidants operating within cellular compartments can fuel the spread of cancer. New work demonstrates how one antioxidant inside particular cellular compartments, the mitochondrial metabolite glutathione, helps cancer cells metastasize throughout the body by enabling their survival under low-oxygen conditions. These findings suggest that therapies capable of blocking glutathione transport into organelles within the cell could help treat breast cancer.

A team of scientists at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research has discovered that inactivation of a stress pathway makes ER+ breast cancer cells ignore stress signals, allowing them to evade treatment.

A new study has identified a set of plasma proteins that can predict whether patients with triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) will respond to immunotherapy.