Funding outcome

Breast cancer is the most common and deadliest cancer type in women worldwide. It affects about 12% of women causes over half a million deaths each year around the world. Breast cancer is most commonly diagnosed cancer also in Canadian women with estimated 25,000 new cases and 5,000 deaths each year. On average,14 Canadian women die from breast cancer every day. About 25% of all diagnosed breast cancers are characterized as 'HER2-positive breast cancer'. HER2 is a gene that codes for HER2 receptor proteins, which are found on the surface of breast tissue cells. Her2 positive breast cancers either makes too many copies of HER2 gene (gene amplification) or too many HER2 receptors on the cell surface (protein overexpression). HER2-positive breast tumors often grow faster and spread more aggressively when compared to HER2-negative breast tumors. Not surprisingly, HER2 has become an important biomarker and target for breast cancer therapy. The main goal of the HER2-targeting approach is to inhibit HER2 receptor resulting in tumor cell suppression. Recently a HER2-targeting neoadjuvant named pertuzumab (Perjeta) has been approved by the FDA for the treatment of HER2-positive breast cancers. Pertuzumab is a monoclonal antibody which binds to the HER2 receptor on the tumor cells and is thought to be able to block HER2 activation. Notwithstanding that many clinical trial studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of pertuzumab, the exact mechanism of action still remains ambiguous. The aim of our project is to investigate how exactly pertuzumab inhibits HER2-positive breast tumors. Understanding the exact mechanism of pertuzumab will help us to figure out why some HER2-positive breast tumors show resistance against pertuzumab. Information from our project will also help us to improve function of pertuzumab reaching maximum efficiency and to discover more effective but less costly new therapies against HER2- positive breast cancers. According to effectiveness of pertuzumab in combination with other drugs in breast cancer cure, discovery of mode of action of these drugs is necessary for oncology community. Our data is essential for cancer researchers and clinical oncologist in administrating the best treatment regimen for patients with breast cancers.