Breast cancer is a major public health problem in the United States and is associated with more than 40,000 deaths each year—most of them caused by metastasis, the spread of cancer to other parts of the body. During metastasis, cells of the primary breast tumor invade blood vessels, travel in the bloodstream, and then exit the vessels to seed tumors in their new location. An enhanced knowledge of the mechanisms that allow some cancer cells to survive and thrive elsewhere in the body is critical for devising new therapies to prevent tumor metastasis.
The National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has awarded Jonathan Backer, MD, Professor and Chair of Molecular Pharmacology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Associate Director for Shared Resources at Montefiore Einstein Cancer Center (MECC), a five-year, $10 million team science (P01) grant to investigate the mechanisms regulating cancer cells that seed tumors in the lungs, a key metastatic site for breast cancer. The research will focus on lung metastases due to triple-negative breast cancer, which is the most aggressive form of breast cancer and more likely than other types of breast cancer to metastasize to the lung. This form of breast cancer is also observed more frequently in Black women, which makes these studies especially relevant to MECC patients in the Bronx.