Researchers at The University of Queensland have helped identify genes that could hold the key to treating a common and deadly type of breast cancer.

The discovery suggests a vaccine could be developed for ER negative breast cancer, which accounts for a third of all breast cancer cases, has a generally poor prognosis and few therapy options.

Work carried out by professor Sunil Lakhani and his team at UQ's Centre for Clinical Research, played a key role in the project which was lead by the international Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR).

The study results were published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The UQCCR team provided analysis of nearly 1,600 tumour samples to confirm the presence of two families of CT-X genes in nearly half of ER negative breast cancers. CT-X genes are thought to be responsible for a natural form of cancer control and might be the cause of spontaneous cancer remission.

"ER negative breast cancer includes a particularly severe type of cancer - triple negative breast cancer, which tends to metastasize early and often to the brain. Many of these cancers are not responsive to current therapies," professor Lakhani said.

"These findings suggest that a therapeutic vaccine, combining members of the two CT-X families, could be a new therapy for filling a critical unmet need," he said.

TNBC is more common in young and African American women.

CT-X gene products are the targets of therapeutic cancer vaccines already in phase-III clinical trials for lung cancer and melanoma.

Dr Andrew Simpson, LICR scientific director and an author of the study, said clinical trials based on the findings of the PNAS study could theoretically be initiated in the near future.