Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Breast cancer is one of the most prevalent forms of cancer in women worldwide. Despite recent advances in understanding the initiation and progression of breast cancer, prognosis still remains poor. Detection and diagnosis of precancerous lesions and tumors early have the potential to improve treatment and reduce cancer-related deaths. Heterogeneity within the cell population is a striking feature of many tumors. Malignant disease may be mainly driven by rare subpopulations of tumor cells, and tumor cell heterogeneity may complicate therapies due to resistant clones within the population of cells. The goal of this interdisciplinary project is to develop a systems-level analysis pipeline to study cell heterogeneity during early tumorigenesis and advanced stage breast cancer in unprecedented resolution. We will implement a recently developed single cell RNA sequencing platform to reveal the gene expression within individual normal human breast epithelial cells and compare the spectrum of cellular heterogeneity to that of tissue of early stages of breast cancer and in more progressed triple negative breast cancer. We will apply and develop identify distinct ell types and states, their specific markers, and how they relate to each other within their path of cancer development. In doing so, we will unravel early systematic changes that occur in breast cancer. Understanding the systems-level changes during breast tumorigenesis in single cell resolution stages may will lead to the identification of novel biomarkers for early cancer detection and may form the basis for the development of therapeutic approaches to prevent breast cancer from progressing into a life threatening condition.