Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Many complex human diseases, including breast cancer, have been linked to strutural variations in the human genomic DNA. One type of structural variation is copy number variation (CNV), which means that some segments of the human DNA can be either duplicated or lost/deleted. This can in turn predispose or cause diseases such as breast cancer. It has been reported that the breast cancer developed in young women, as compared to their older counterparts, have an unique biology and tends to have worse survival outcome. Therefore, we want to find a way to detect these CNVs that occur only in the young age group with breast cancer and look for mutations within them. Ultimately, we aim to develop a set of biomarkers/genes that can be used to not only predict the survival of these young patients, but also to be able to optimize their treatment regime by incorporating these genetic information with the clinical diagnosis.