Jackson Lab nabs $2.8M in fed grants to target breast cancer

Courtesy / Jackson Laboratory Jackson Laboratory President and CEO Edison Liu.

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By Staff

Two Jackson Laboratory professors, including the Bar Harbor Lab’s CEO, were awarded two U.S. Department of Defense grants totaling $2.8 million to research one of the most deadly breast cancers.

Edison Liu, JAX president and CEO, was awarded $1,393,246, and will collaborate with Ralph Scully of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. And JAX Professor Karolina Palucka was awarded $1,386,446, according to a JAX announcement on Friday March 3.

Some 3 million American women are living with breast cancer, according to Cancer Statistics. And research has advanced understanding of the biology and genetics of each type of breast cancer and led to a steady rise in the overall five-year survival rate to 80% following diagnosis of the disease, according to the National Cancer Institute.

Both research groups are studying one of the most deadly forms of breast cancer that affects 20% of those with the disease. It is known as triple-negative breast cancer, or TNBC.

TNBC eludes three of the most effective therapies that target cancer-driving molecules: estrogen receptors, progesterone receptors, or large amounts of HER2/neu protein, according to the researchers. Patients thus have poor outcomes, they said.

“TNBC tumors have complex and massive changes to their entire DNA makeup, also known as the cancer genome,” Liu said in a statement. “By analogy, where a single change might be seen as a misplaced letter in a gene, many cancer genes in TNBC are misspelled, repeated wholesale or deleted in many different places. Because it is much more difficult to read so many changes at once, it is also harder to identify those that are important for TNBC growth and sensitivity to treatment.”

Last year Liu discovered that TNBC tumors and certain other deadly cancers of women share a genomic configuration that responds to cisplatin chemotherapy. His lab subsequently found that not all TNBC tumors are the same, and that for each “subtype” there are genes for which specific therapies are already FDA-approved or in development.

With the new grant Liu and Scully will use advanced computational methods to develop a more precise approach for classifying TNBC tumors, better understand the formation of subtypes and find novel potential treatments to test.

Palucka will use the grant to understand the underlying mechanisms that control the spread of cancer and look for possible new, targeted treatments to help increase the survival of TNBC cancer patients.