A $16.5 million, three-year grant to develop new and more effective therapies to fight breast cancer was awarded today to a multi-institutional "dream team" of scientists and clinicians coled by Joe Gray, a renowned cancer researcher with the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).
The grant was awarded by Stand Up to Cancer, an Entertainment Industry Foundation charitable organization aimed at moving cancer research out of the lab and into the clinic. Working with its scientific partner, the American Association for Cancer Research, Stand Up to Cancer awarded a total of $73.6 million to five multidisciplinary dream teams whose research could impact the diagnosis and treatment of a wide range of cancers.
The Breast Cancer Dream Team will strive to bring personalized treatments to the spectrum of diseases that comprise breast cancer, which kills approximately 40,000 women annually in the U.S. and many more worldwide. The team is co-led by Dennis Slamon, director of Clinical/Translational Research at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, and includes 12 leading scientists and clinicians from institutions around the nation.
The team will apply cutting-edge biological, genomic and computational techniques to breast cancer research, with the goal of matching a tumor's genetic and molecular profile with the therapy that has the best chance of treating it. They will also make this targeted approach available to scientists and clinicians across the nation.
Their work could mean that in a few years, a woman diagnosed with breast cancer will receive a treatment strategy that is tailored to fight her specific type of tumor, and which is informed by the combined expertise of the Breast Cancer Dream Team's clinicians, genomics researchers, systems biologists, computational biologists, and other experts.
"We want to make a major advance in the way that we treat breast cancer," said Gray, who is the director of LBNL's Life Sciences Division and and Associate Laboratory Director for Life and Environmental Sciences. He is also an adjunct professor in the department of laboratory medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine, and program leader of breast oncology and cancer genetics at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.
"We've made significant progress in our understanding of the molecular basis of cancer. We know now that breast cancer is not one disease, but a collection of several different diseases," added Gray. "Now, we need to bring this knowledge to clinicians and move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach to cancer treatment."
The Breast Cancer Dream Team will study three subtypes of breast cancer: estrogen receptor positive, HER2 positive, and a particularly aggressive subtype called triple negative that affects young women and ethnic minorities more frequently than other populations, and is often not detected until it metastasizes.
