Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in women worldwide. Metastasis, which is the spread of cancer cells from a primary tumor to other areas in the body, remains the main cause of patient related death, due to organ damage caused by the growing metastases.The 5-year survival of patients with localized, organ confined, breast cancer ranges from 98-72% dependent on stage, but this drops significantly to 27% once the tumor has metastasized. Awareness of the clinical importance of metastasis and our basic scientific understanding of the metastatic process has improved substantially over the past few decades. However, many aspects of metastasis are still not well defined and our ability to identify and treat patients at high risk for cancer recurrence is limited. This highlights the need for better prognostic markers to identify patients at high risk for developing metastatic disease. We have identified a novel sugar, or glycan, based prognostic marker in breast cancer and propose a project that will investigate expression on breast cancer patient tissue and in blood-plasma for use as a prognostic indicator. We also propose to identify the proteins carrying the glycan chains and determine if they have prognostic significance or correlate with any of the well-established clinical biomarkers of ER (estrogen receptor), PR (progesterone receptor) or HER2 (human epidermal growth factor receptor 2). Our work has potential to develop a breast cancer test that would provide evidence-based information capable of directing patient treatment to support important decisions about breast cancer treatment reducing the overtreatment of low-risk patients while providing aggressive treatments to high-risk patients.