Funding outcome

Breast cancer as a whole is truly not a single disease. While these cancers originate in the breast, the tumors that develop can be quite different between women. Several of these differences are well known and used by physicians to guide the treatment of patients. When a woman's breast cancer makes a protein known as the estrogen receptor (ER), we know that the treatment of the patient with Tamoxifen will likely result in a positive outcome and long survivorship for these woman. If a breast cancer does not express the ER we know that Tamoxifen will not be effective and the woman is then subjected to alternative treatments, such as chemotherapy. Despite the development of these more personalized treatments for women with breast cancer, the outcomes are not absolute. While a majority of women with the ER -expressing cancers respond well with Tamoxifen treatment some do not and experience disease relapse and mortality. Our question is: What is different with the tumors in these women? Are there some of differences in their cancers that we could have seen at the beginning which could have then changed their treatment? Our lab has recently completed a deep analysis of different ER-expressing breast tumors from women whom either favorably responded to treatment or unfortunately succumbed to the disease despite treatment. This initial study has identified a number of unique proteins that appear to identify which women do not respond well to standard treatment. We now need to determine whether these differences hold true by looking at a much larger set of tumors to determine whether we can truly predict which women actually require alternative or aggresive cancer treatment.