New hope emerges for breast cancer

A drug widely used to treat a bone disease could also help combat an aggressive form of breast cancer, according to studies by the Zhejiang University School of Medicine.

Research led by professor Dong Chenfang found that zoledronic acid - which is used to treat osteoporosis - inhibits UGT8, a metabolic enzyme that drives the development of basal-like breast cancer, or BLBC.

BLBC is extremely hard to treat, as it generally falls into the triple-negative subtype, meaning its genes do not have an estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor or the HER 2 protein, the main targets for breast cancer therapies.