Research led by Shyamal Desai, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans, has discovered a key change in the body’s defense system that increases the potential for breast cancer to spread to other parts of the body. The results, reported for the first time, are featured in the January 2012 issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine.

The research, funded by the National Institutes of Health, found that a cellular defense system called the ISG15 pathway, which is normally involved in fighting bacterial and viral infection, is triggered in breast cancer to disrupt normal cytoskeletal function and increase the possibility that the cancer cells will metastasize, or spread. Dr. Desai noted that this discovery has important implications in other cancers as well.

The research team also included Arthur Haas, PhD, and Dr. Desai’s lab members Ryan Reed, Surendran Sankar, PhD, and Julian Burks in the LSUHSC Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Jerome Breslin, PhD, in the LSUHSC Department of Physiology, and Ashok Pullikuth, PhD, in the LSUHSC Department Pharmacology, as well as scientists at the UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey, and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia.