Grant: Operating Grant

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among Canadian women as 1 in 9 women over their lifetime will be diagnosed with this form of cancer. In 2010, approximately 445 Canadian women per week were diagnosed with breast cancer and 5,300 died from this disease. The vast majority of these women would have been offered some form of chemotherapy treatment. Long chain polyunsaturated omega-3 fatty acids, found in fatty fish from cold water, have been shown to decrease breast cancer growth in laboratory animals and human cancer cells in culture (e.g. in petri dishes). Recently, studies from our group have suggested that one of these omega-3 fatty acids, docosahexanoic acid or DHA, can improve the ability of a common chemotherapy drugs to kill breast cancer cells. Our studies indicate that DHA can kill cancer cells using some of the same death signals that chemotherapy drugs use. We are proposing that treating breast cancer cells with DHA will improve the effectiveness of current breast cancer chemotherapy drugs. We will test this idea by growing human breast cancer cells grown in dishes in the lab and determining if the signals used by DHA to kill cancer are the same as the signals used by chemotherapy drugs. We anticipate that feeding the cells DHA will increase these signals after chemotherapy treatment. Then, we will use a rodent model, commonly used to test cancer treatments, to demonstrate that feeding DHA before and during chemotherapy treatment improves the action of the drugs and the side effects experienced by patients. Our studies will provide evidence that an inexpensive dietary treatment will improve drug effectiveness without additional toxic side effects to the patient. Our work has the potential to significantly benefit women diagnosed with breast cancer.