Susan Komen Foundation donates $900,000 for breast-cancer research at Idibell and VHIO
The team led by Aleix Prat (VHIO) is studying alternative treatment to chemotherapy for breast cancer and that led by Eva González-Suárez (Idibell), a new target to prevent tumor creation.
By Biocat
The US Susan G. Komen foundation, the biggest non-profit investor in breast-cancer research in the world, will contribute a total of $900,000 to two projects by scientists Aleix Prat, head researcher of the Translational Genomics Group at the Vall d'Hebron Oncology Institute (VHIO), and Eva González-Suárez, head of the Transformation and Metastasis Group at the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (Idibell), over the coming three years.
Prat and González-Suárez are the first researchers in Spain to receive a Career Catalyst Research Grant from this foundation since it was created in 1982. The 2013 call for proposals awarded 94 grants in this category to scientists in England, Belgium, Canada, France, Israel, Italy and Switzerland, and the majority going to those in the United States.
VHIO: treating breast cancer without chemotherapy
The project the group led by Dr. Aleix Prat will work on falls under the framework of one of their main lines of research and consists of developing biomarkers to identify the best treatment for cancer patients. “The aim is to find genetic patterns that can predict tumors better than other clinical behaviors,” explained Prat.
For example, they have recently completed a study on thousands of hormone-sensitive breast-cancer tumors and “this analysis has led us to validate a biomarker that improves on current screening for patients that don’t need chemotherapy.”
Now the next step, through the project funded by the Komen Foundation, is to identify patients with HER2-positive tumors that can be treated with biological anti-HER2 therapies without the need for chemotherapy. To do this, they will carry out a clinical trial with 150 patients from 12 hospitals around Spain, coordinated by Aleix Prat and Javier Cortés from Vall d'Hebron and Antonio Llombart of Solti and Hospital Arnau de Vilanova in Valencia. Tumors with the HER2 protein make up 20% of all cases of breast cancer.
More information is available on the VHIO website.
Idibell: new target to prevent onset of tumors
The group led by Dr. Eva González-Suárez will study the possibility of using the RANK signaling pathway as a new therapeutic target in breast cancer, after having shown in mice and human cell lines that overexpression of this protein promotes the initiation, progression and metastasis of this tumor. They have also seen that an inhibitor of this pathway, a drug already used to treat bone metastases and osteoporosis, prevents the formation of breast-cancer tumors and has a preventative effect on tumor initiation and lung metastasis.
Breast cancer mainly affects women and is the most common type of tumor. The latest data from the Government of Catalonia’s Canal Salut Càncer shows that 13,700 new cases of cancer are diagnosed each year in women in Catalonia and nearly 4,000 are breast cancer.
"The Susan Komen Foundation project will allow us to study the expression of patterns in the RANK pathway in more than 300 patient samples, so we can correlate these patterns with the incidence of metastasis and response to currently approved treatments,” explained González-Suárez.
More information is available on the Idibell website.