Ben-Gurion University team finds a protein that helps aggressive breast cancer spread

Scientists at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev reported in April 2026 that a protein called PKC-eta (protein kinase C-eta) plays a central part in helping triple-negative breast cancer spread through the body. The study was led by Prof. Etta Livneh and Prof. Moshe Elkabets of the Faculty of Health Sciences, with postdoctoral fellow Liju Vijaya Steltar, and appeared in Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy, a Nature Portfolio journal.

Triple-negative breast cancer lacks the hormone receptors and HER2 protein that many targeted drugs act on, so it is harder to treat and more likely to return. Its greatest danger is metastasis, when cells leave the original tumour and settle in organs such as the lungs, liver or brain. The BGU team combined patient tumour data with experiments on cancer cell lines and mice to see what PKC-eta does in this process.

They found that the protein makes cancer cells more mobile and invasive and switches on gene programmes that let them break away, migrate and seed new tumours. It does this in part by binding to and activating YAP, a key part of the Hippo signalling pathway that controls cell growth. Tumours with features linked to a poor outlook carried more PKC-eta. When the researchers reduced or removed the protein, tumours grew more slowly and spread far less.

The group also identified a small, naturally occurring peptide, encoded just upstream of PKC-eta on the same messenger RNA, that breaks the protein down. In animal models it reduced the spread of cancer to the lungs and liver. Livneh suggested that measuring PKC-eta could help identify patients at higher risk of metastasis, while Elkabets said the peptide might be developed into a targeted drug. The authors stress that the results come from laboratory and animal work and that more research is needed before any clinical use.