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A latest finding by researchers in Australia suggests that breast cancer cells can destroy a powerful immune response in the body and allow the disease to spread to the patient's bones.

The researchers also experimented with two ways to restore this immune response of the body that could help patients fight breast cancer, but they said that it need years of studies and experiments before this can be turned into a therapy.

"We have identified a way that breast cancer cells can turn off the immune system, allowing them to spread to distant parts such as the bone," said lead author of the study, Belinda Parker, a research fellow at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne according to REUTERS.

"By understanding how this occurs, we hope to use existing and new therapies to restore this immune function and prevent the spread of cancer," she said.

Breast Cancer is the most common type of cancer kills 89 percent of women affected with the disease in developing countries. The disease affected 1.5 million people around the world in 2010.

For the study, the researchers conducted the experiment on mice using tissue samples from breast cancer patients.  It was found that a gene called IRF7 gets affected in breast cancer patients. Breast cancer cells switch off IRF7 and that allows the disease to spread to the bones.

IRF7 helps the production of interferon, a significant immune protein that fights viruses and bacteria apart from tumor cells, says the report.

"Usually when breast cancer cells leave the breast and travel in the bloodstream and into bone marrow, the release of interferons by IRF7 will cause the immune system to recognize those cells and eliminate them," Parker said.

"But by losing IRF7, it prevents the stimulation of immune responses and allows those cells to hide from being recognized (and later spread)."

Apparently, the two ways in which Parker and her team tried to revive this immune response in mice experiments worked.

"We put the gene back into cancer cells so it can't switch it (IRF7) off. We allowed the immune pathway to be stimulated and the cancer cells did not spread to the bone," Parker said.

"The other way is to treat the animals with interferon, which is available for treating other diseases, like hepatitis. That also prevented the spread of cancer to the bone."

Parker said that she and her team will be studying these two methods extensively to see how they could use on patients in the coming years. A clinical trial of the methods is planned in next two to three years.

The study was published on Monday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Medicine.