When standard treatments stop working for metastatic triple-negative breast cancer, options can run out. Researchers wondered if a scan used for prostate cancer might reveal a new target. They gave 20 patients with this aggressive, progressing cancer a special PET/CT scan that looks for a protein called PSMA.
The scan showed that half of the patients had visible PSMA uptake in most of their tumors. Looking closer, about two-thirds of the individual cancer spots lit up on the scan. However, the picture wasn't uniform. In most patients, some tumors had the target while others didn't, showing this approach might not work for every spot.
This is a small, early look from a single hospital. The scan itself wasn't a treatment, and we don't know if the patients experienced any side effects from it. The results simply suggest it's worth investigating a PSMA-targeted therapy for this specific group, but much more research is needed to see if it would actually help.