|
“The challenge of cancer treatment has been to target specific therapies to pathogenetically distinct tumor subtypes, to maximize efficacy and minimize toxicity,” Wang said. “However, tumors with similar histopathological appearance can follow significantly different clinical courses and show different responses to therapy.”
|
|
A report from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) indicates almost 11 percent of all women living to the age of 80 will develop breast cancer, and approximately 40,000 women die of this disease each year in the U.S.
If detected early, the five-year survival rate exceeds 95 percent.
Breast cancer incidence continues to increase, but mortality from this disease has begun to decrease in recent years, reflecting the impact of early detection and treatment.
Normally, cells grow and divide to produce more cells only when the body needs them. Sometimes cells keep dividing when new cells are not needed. These cells may form a mass of extra tissue called a growth or tumor. Tumors can be benign (not cancerous) or malignant (cancerous).
Breast cancer is a malignant (cancerous) tumor that starts from cells of the breast. The disease occurs mostly in women, but men can get breast cancer as well.
For more information on breast cancer, please visit, http://www.nci.nih.gov
http://www.breastcancer.org
http://www.cancer.gov
|
An ARI professor leads a collaborative research team on developing novel bioinformatics tools for improved diagnostics and therapy of breast cancer.
Yue Wang (Joseph), a Virginia Tech professor of electrical and computer engineering, is the principal investigator and co-principal investigator in three National Institutes of Health (NIH) and one Department of Defense (DOD) funded research projects on “Molecular Analysis of Breast Cancer.”
The projects include researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center, The Catholic University of America, National Cancer Institute, Johns Hopkins University and Virginia Tech.
“The challenge of cancer treatment has been to target specific therapies to pathogenetically distinct tumor subtypes, to maximize efficacy and minimize toxicity,” Wang said. “However, tumors with similar histopathological appearance can follow significantly different clinical courses and show different responses to therapy.”
He said a major problem in treating breast cancer is that two cancerous cells may look alike under a microscope, but may behave differently in two people.
The recent development of gene microarrays, which are basically silicon chips or nylon membranes imprinted with cDNA or its segments that allow researchers to study the interaction among thousands of genes at once by analyzing their expression patterns, provides an opportunity to take a genome-wide approach to predict clinical heterogeneity in cancer treatment.
“Although such global views are likely to reveal previously unrecognized patterns of gene regulation and generate new hypotheses warranting further study, widespread use of molecular profiling methods is limited by the need for further technology developments, particularly comprehensive bioinformatics tools not previously included by the instruments,” Wang said.
Project researchers will work to obtain the molecular signature—the fingerprint of each patient’s cancer—to determine the best combination of therapies for each patient.
“The long-term goal of the proposed work is to develop, test and disseminate effective bioinformatics tools to interpret the rich information about underlying cancer biology present in gene microarray data and to facilitate molecular classification/prediction of cancer and response to therapy,” Wang said.
The study involves the recruitment of 60 breast cancer patients—20 people per year over a three-year period. The team will test two anti-breast cancer drugs on each patient three times during one session. Each session happens every two weeks.
The team will then place the patients into one of three categories. The first category is the “highly response” category, meaning the patient has responded well to the anti-breast cancer drug. The second category is “non response,” and the third category is a “partially response.”
The goal is to try to identify the genes responsible for the different responses to cancer treatment, thus that researchers will be able to target and intervene specific genes to stop cancer growth.
Wang is also planning to develop a grid system to organize the massive amounts of data collected in the project.
For more information, please contact Yue Wang (Joseph).
|
