2007 Recipients
Ingrid A. Mayer, M.D.
Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN
Project: Combined endocrine and Erbb inhibition in ER+/HER2+ breast cancers
Dr. Mayer serves as a clinical investigator and Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. With the funding from the Breast Cancer Research Foundation-AACR Grant for Translational Breast Cancer Research, Dr. Mayer will focus her efforts on trying to find out if the combination of two drugs, Letrozole (Femara®) and Lapatinib (Tykerb®) will work better in preventing failure of these tumors response to an anti-hormonal treatment. Dr. Mayer is focusing her research towards these aims because, "we need more and better choices for treating a form of breast cancer whose growth is both dependent on hormones and HER2, and do not respond well to drugs that stop the growth of cancer cells by decreasing the amount of estrogen that is produced in the body, or drugs that are active against HER2, when given by themselves." Dr. Mayer and her research team will perform a clinical trial using the drugs Letrozole (Femara®) and Lapatinib (Tykerb®) together for 14 weeks, before definitive surgery, in post-menopausal patients with hormone-dependent, HER2-positive breast cancers. By carefully studying these tumors with state-of-the-art techniques from a molecular point of view before and after surgery, she hopes to find a "molecular signature" that will tell which subset of these tumors are more likely to respond the Letrozole/Lapatinib drug combination, by linking the molecular information to the degree of tumor shrinkage we see prior to surgery. Dr. Mayer hopes that "in the end, the studies proposed here will help reduce the mortality of patients with hormone-responsive, HER2-positive breast cancer."
Alana Welm, Ph.D.
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT
Project: The MSP pathway as a therapeutic target in aggressive breast cancers
Dr. Welm is Assistant Professor, Oncological Sciences at the Huntsman Cancer Institute. Dr. Welm and her research team are currently investigating the role of macrophage stimulating protein (MSP) in breast cancer metastasis. They have found that over-expression of MSP drives metastasis of breast cancer in mice. "We validated the clinical relevance of this finding through gene expression data gathered from patients with early stage breast cancer, which showed that over-expression of three genes within the MSP pathway served as highly accurate indicators of poor prognosis in patients with early breast cancer." With funding from the BCRF-AACR Grant for Translational Breast Cancer Research, Dr. Welm seeks to translate these findings to the clinic by developing a diagnostic test for over-expression of the MSP pathway as a biomarker for poor prognosis and to carry out pre-clinical tests of three MSP pathway inhibitors in order to block growth and/or metastasis of breast cancer.
Douglas Yee, M.D.
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
Project: Gene expression profiling to predict response to anti-IGF therapy
Dr. Yee serves as the Cancer Center Director and Professor of the University of Minnesota Medical School. With a long-standing interest in the regulation of breast cancer biology by the insulin-like growth factors (IGFs), Dr. Yee has shown that breast cancer cells behave differently after IGF receptor stimulation depending on specific molecules engaged by the receptor; the receptor alone is insufficient to trigger a biologic response. Dr. Yee believes that "only measuring IGF receptor levels will not be sufficient to identify "IGF-driven" tumors and will not help us select patients who would benefit from anti-IGF therapies." Thus with funding from the BCRF-AACR Grant for Translational Breast Cancer Research, he hopes to establish gene expression patterns that will serve as better predictors of anti-IGF therapy and help identify patients most likely to benefit from the targeting of this system. He states, "The laboratory's long term goal is to improve breast cancer treatment by understanding and targeting the key components of the IGF system. In breast cancer, development of therapeutics designed to target specific growth regulatory molecules has proven to be remarkably successful in the clinic."